Digital visual culture: theory and practice 9781841502489, 9781841502991, 1841502480

Citation preview

BENTKOWSKA-KAFEL /CASHEN/GARDINER

COmPUTERS AND THE HISTORY Of ART Volume 3

DIGITAL VISUAL CULTURE THEORY AND PRACTICE Edited by Anna Bentkowska-Kafel, Trish Cashen and Hazel Gardiner

ISBN 978-1-84150-248-9

00

9 781841 502489

intellect | www.intellectbooks.com

Digital Visual Culture Theory and Practice

Digital Visual Culture Theory and Practice Computers and the History of Art, Yearbook 2006, Volume 3 Edited by Anna Bentkowska-Kafel, Trish Cashen and Hazel Gardiner The papers by Elizabeth Coulter-Smith and Graham Coulter-Smith, Dew Harrison, AnnSophie Lehmann, Hamid van Koten and Ralf Nuhn were originally presented at the CHArt 21st annual conference, Theory and Practice, held at the British Academy, London, Thursday 10–Friday 11 November 2005 and are published online at www.chart.ac.uk/chart2005. The papers by Karen Cham, Maria Chatzichristodoulou, Anne Laforet and Elaine Shemilt were originally presented at the CHArt 22nd annual conference, Fast Forward. Art History, Curation and Practice after Media, held at Birkbeck, University of London, Thursday 9–Friday 10 November 2006 and are published online at www.chart.ac.uk/chart2006. The papers have been refereed by the CHArt Editorial Board and Jim Devine of the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow, Scotland, and Peter Main of the British Museum. CHArt would like to thank all the reviewers for their help. Disclaimer: The articles in this collection express the views of the authors and not necessarily those of the CHArt Editorial Board. Articles © individual author(s) and reproduction is with their permission. Illustrations © individual authors unless stated otherwise. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise, without first seeking the written permission of the copyright owners and the publisher. CHArt Committee: Christopher Bailey, Leeds Metropolitan University, UK Anna Bentkowska-Kafel, King’s College London, UK Trish Cashen, The Open University, UK Rupert Faulkner (Treasurer), Victoria and Albert Museum, UK Francesca Franco (Student Member), Birkbeck, University of London, UK Hazel Gardiner, King’s College London, UK Charlie Gere (Chairman), Lancaster University, UK Marlene Gordon, University of Michigan, USA Neil Grindley, Joint Information Systems Committee, London, UK Michael Hammel, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark Colum Hourihane, Index of Christian Art, Princeton University, USA Mike Pringle, Swindon Cultural Partnership, UK Phillip Purdy, Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, London, UK Jemima Rellie, Getty Conservation Institute, Los Angeles, USA Tanya Szrajber, British Museum, London, UK Suzette Worden, Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Western Australia CHArt, Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London, 26–29 Drury Lane, London WC2B 5RL. Tel: +44 (0)20 7848 2013, Fax: +44 (0)20 7848 2980, www.chart.ac.uk, [email protected]

Digital Visual Culture Theory and Practice Computers and the History of Art Series

Edited by Anna Bentkowska-Kafel, Trish Cashen and Hazel Gardiner

^ciZaaZXi
7g^hida!J@
8]^XV\d!JH6

First published in the UK in 2009 by Intellect Books, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK First published in the USA in 2009 by Intellect Books, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA Copyright © 2009 Intellect Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Cover Design: Holly Rose Copy Editor: Rhys Williams Typesetting: Mac Style, Beverley, E. Yorkshire

ISBN 978-1-84150-248-9 EISBN 978-1-84150-299-1

Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta.

Contents

7

11

Contributors Introduction by Hazel Gardiner

Digital Creativity

15 Aesthetics and Interactive Art by Karen Cham

23 A Blueprint of Bacterial Life: Can a Science-art Fusion Move the Boundaries of Visual and Audio Interpretation? by Elaine Shemilt 33 Invisible Work: The Representation of Artistic Practice in Digital Visual Culture by Ann-Sophie Lehmann

Digital Spaces

49 Mapping Outside the Frame: Interactive and Locative Art Environments by Elizabeth Coulter-Smith and Graham Coulter-Smith 67 From UNCAGED to Cyber-Spatialism by Ralf Nuhn

Digital Presence



79 When Presence-absence Becomes Pattern-randomness: Blast Theory’s Can You See Me Now? by Maria Chatzichristodoulou [aka maria x]

89 The Digital Image and the Pleasure Principle: The Consumption of Realism in the Age of Simulation by Hamid van Koten



Digital Archive

101 Digital Archiving as an Art Practice by Dew Harrison

6  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

109 Preservation of Net Art in Museums by Anne Laforet

115 Abstracts



125 CHArt – Computers and the History of Art



127 Guidelines for Submitting Papers for the CHArt Yearbook

Contributors Anna Bentkowska-Kafel is currently a research fellow for the 3D Visualisation in the Arts Network, 3DVisA (http://3dvisa.cch.kcl.ac.uk), funded by the UK Joint Information Systems Committee and hosted by the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London. She is also Associate Director of the Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland (www.crsbi.ac.uk) and is responsible for the creation and longterm preservation of the project’s digital archive. Her research, teaching and publications have been mainly on early modern visual culture in western Europe, with special interest in cosmological and anthropomorphic representations of nature; as well as the use of computer graphics in the study and interpretation of art. She holds an MA in the History of Art (Warsaw), an MA in Computing Applications for the History of Art (London) and a Ph.D. in Digital Media Studies (Southampton). She has been a member of the CHArt committee since 1999. Trish Cashen has been involved with integrating computing into university-level humanities teaching since working with the UK Computers in Teaching Initiative in the early 1990s. She works at The Open University, where her role involves exploiting a range of new media for teaching arts subjects. Her main areas of interest lie in developing blended learning environments to facilitate resource discovery, formative assessment and communication. She is currently investigating the use of social networking tools for learner support. She has been a member of the CHArt committee since 1994. Karen Cham is an artist, lecturer and researcher. She is Principal Lecturer in Digital Media and Development Director of the Digital Media Institute at Kingston University, United Kingdom. She has been working with audio-visual technology since 1987 making performance, installation and screen-based works. She explores the poetic potential of media technologies within a critical context. Current research interests include digital semiotics, computational media aesthetics and design for interaction. Maria Chatzichristodoulou, aka maria x, is a doctoral candidate at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is based at Goldsmiths’ Digital Studios. Her background is in theatre and digital media arts. She worked as a performer, curator and producer, and has been the initiator and coordinator of interdisciplinary events and cultural activities in Greece and the United Kingdom. She co-directed the Fournos Centre for Digital Culture and Mediaterra Arts and Technologies Festival in Athens, 1996–2002 and has collaborated with the French Centre International Creation Video et Multimedia (CICV, 2000–2003) as curator and researcher; and with the Machinista Festival in Glasgow, 2004. She has worked as Community Participation Officer for the Albany Centre in London, 2003–2005, and has lectured at Goldsmiths College, Richmond American University in London and Birkbeck, University of London. Elizabeth Coulter-Smith (www.coultersmith.com) is a new media artist and lecturer and has worked in the visual arts in Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom.

She is Head of Fine Art at Staffordshire University. Prior to this appointment she was a Senior Lecturer in New Media at Birmingham Institute of Art and Design (BIAD) 2003–2006. From 2001–2003 she worked at the University of Southampton, School of Computer Science and Electronics. She is currently working on a site specific ‘locative’ commission. Her work can be found in corporate, public and private collections in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. Graham Coulter-Smith (www.coultersmith.com) is Postdoctoral Fellow in Contemporary Art in the Faculty of Media, Art and Society at Southampton Solent University, and Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Art Theory at Staffordshire University. He is the author of The Postmodern Art of Imants Tillers: Appropriation en abyme 1971–2001, Paul Holberton Publishing, 2002; and Deconstructing Installation Art: Fine Art and Media Art, 1986–2006. Madrid: Brumaria, 2009. He co-edited, with Maurice Owen, Art in the Age of Terrorism, published for Southampton Solent University’s Centre for Advanced Scholarship in Art and Design by Paul Holberton Publishing, 2005.

8  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

Hazel Gardiner is an editor for the Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland (www.crsbi.ac.uk) and coordinates the visual culture module of the MA in Digital Humanities at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King’s College London. Prior to this she was Senior Project Officer for the ICT Methods Network, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London. She is a researcher for the CRSBI and also for the Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi (www.cvma.ac.uk). She has been a member of the CHArt committee since 1997. Dew Harrison is a researcher and practitioner in digital and computer-mediated art currently working as Reader in Digital Media Art at the University of Wolverhampton, United Kingdom. Within her practice she undertakes a critical exploration of conceptual art, the non-linear narrative and multimedia mind-mapping. She often works collaboratively and considers curation a form of digital media art practice.  She continues to show internationally and has  presented papers at diverse conferences spanning digital art, consciousness studies, art history and museology. She also works as a co-director of PVA MediaLab‚ LabCulture Ltd, a supportive agency working across UK and international media centres to enable artists to engage with new media. Hamid van Koten is the programme leader for Contemporary Media Theory at the School of Television and Imaging at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design at the University of Dundee in Scotland. In this capacity he teaches students from the departments of Animation, Illustration, Time-Based Art and Interactive Media Design. Born near Rotterdam, he came to Britain in 1977, initially to study Middle and FarEastern philosophy. He graduated in 1993 from the Glasgow School of Art in product design. Before taking up a full-time lecturing post at Dundee University, he worked for ten years as a design consultant in diverse media. Anne Laforet is a doctoral candidate in the Culture and Communication Department at the University of Avignon, France. Her Ph.D. thesis is entitled Preservation of Net Art in Museums; an Analysis of Moving Practices. Since 1998, her research has mainly been on Internet art and the way museums approach, collect and preserve such artworks. In 2003

she participated in the Preservation of Electronic Records symposium in Ottawa and the International Conference on Hypermedia and Interactivity in Museums (ICHIM) in Paris. In 2004, she wrote a report on Net art preservation for the Délégation aux Arts Plastiques of the French Ministry of Culture. In May 2005, Leonardo Electronic Almanac published her article ‘Preservation of Net Art’. In parallel to her academic research, she explores network-based art as a practitioner, event organiser and writer. Ann-Sophie Lehmann is an assistant professor in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at the University of Utrecht. She read the History of Art in Vienna and Utrecht where she obtained her Ph.D. She serves on the editorial boards of the Netherlandish yearbook for the History of Art, NKJ and Kunstschrift. Her research is concerned with the theory, history and practice of image-making in old and new media cultures. Her recent projects include The Brush in the Computer, concerned with the history of early computer graphics and paint programmes, and The Impact of Oil (www.impactofoil. org), both funded by the Organisation for Scientific Research of the Netherlands. Ralf Nuhn is a German-born, London and Lille-based intermedia artist who has exhibited and performed internationally. He is currently working as a practice-based researcher at the Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts, London, where he has also obtained a Ph.D. in Media Arts. His current installation and performance practice is mainly concerned with relationships between the physical world and the virtual world of computers, and has a strong focus on audience participation. Elaine Shemilt is an artist and academic, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and Shackleton Scholar. She is Professor of Fine Art Printmaking at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, the University of Dundee. She studied Sculpture at Winchester School of Art and Printmaking at the Royal College of Art. Her artistic practice involves sculpture, installation, printmaking and digital media. She has an international reputation for innovation in the use of printmaking across forms. In her early career she exhibited at The Hayward Annual Exhibition in London, The Bradford International Print Biennale and the Video Show in the Serpentine gallery in London. More recently her work has been shown at the Imperial War Museum, London and in Warsaw, Berlin and Singapore.

Contributors  9

Introduction Hazel Gardiner

The papers in this volume are drawn from two CHArt conferences. The first of these, Theory and Practice, was held at the British Academy, London, on 10–11 November 2005. This conference reflected upon the relationship between theory and practice across digital media and technology in the visual arts, with a particular focus on art practice. The second conference, Fast Forward. Art History, Curation and Practice After Media was held at Birkbeck, University of London on 9–10 November 2006. This event placed particular emphasis on the issues faced in contemporary curation, especially with regard to new media artworks. It also addressed the impact that technological advances, as well as new art practices, are having on visual culture disciplines. A number of the papers in the volume incorporate some analysis of the standing of practice-based research, pointing out the lack of recognition within academic and other institutions of the research process within art practice, particularly when this incorporates advanced technologies. This was a prominent theme in Theory and Practice. Various aspects of contemporary practice are represented here, including locative and object-oriented art environments, as addressed by Elizabeth and Graham CoulterSmith. They investigate the contribution of such adaptive or ‘intelligent’ work to changes in the spatial awareness and role of the viewer, no longer a passive observer. Another type of collaborative association is detailed in Elaine Shemilt’s paper. Her work with the Scottish Crop Research Institute (SCRI) has led to some remarkable discoveries and cross-fertilisations between art practice and advanced scientific methods and is indicative of a growing number of such collaborations. The SCRI proposed the above collaboration as a means of outreach, to help them communicate their complex scientific investigations to a broad public. The fact that the artworks made visual valuable scientific data which had previously been overlooked, was an exciting and unexpected result. Laforet’s archaeological approach to the preservation of Net art demonstrates another aspect of cross-disciplinary potentials. In seeking to identify an effective model for the curation and long-term preservation of new media, Laforet has taken the archaeological museum rather than the art gallery as her exemplar. She identifies that the curatorial focus within institutions has now shifted slightly away from preservation toward documentation and proposes that the gathering and assembling of evidence about Net art, rather than an attempted re-envisioning or reconstruction, is a more appropriate model to follow. Maria Chatzichristodoulou (aka maria x) examines how the concepts of presence or absence may become blurred in digital telematic practice. This is addressed in the

context of the work Can You See Me Now? by the British group, Blast Theory. This installation, which is also a performance event and a game, takes place online and simultaneously in reality, in a real city. This work raises a range of questions about postmodern and posthuman art practice, echoing Jacques Derrida, N. Katherine Hayles and others, in addressing relationships between the corporeal and the virtual, time and space. Subtle changes in the perception of what is understood as art practice are also explored in this volume, and suggestions are made toward a further expansion of this understanding. Considering the creation of the art archive as a form of art practice, and as a curatorial project or an artwork in itself is one such example, proposed by Dew Harrison. She argues this point in line with Derrida and other contemporary art theorists. Hamid van Koten examines the social and philosophical implications of the digital environment, drawing on modern philosophical and media theories such as Marshall McLuhan’s notions of ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ media, while Ralf Nuhn explores the tensions between the real and the virtual, in the context of his own practice which aims to bridge the gap between the digital and the physical world. Karen Cham dissects the traditionally-accepted concept of the ‘aura’ of the ‘original’ in her analysis of the aesthetics of interactivity. This paper also highlights the importance of developing a sense of theoretical continuity between historical and contemporary art practice. Ann-Sophie Lehmann investigates the representational status of artistic practice in new media art, putting forward the idea that electronically-based contemporary art has not yet reached a point at which it is able to be self reflective, in terms of making the creative process part of the work of art. This paper demonstrates in the very consciousness of this lack that such matters are now ready to be addressed within the art practice community.

12  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

In all, this volume comprises an excellent set of papers, addressing matters which continue to resonate ever more strongly. The papers are grouped under four distinctive themes, but the reader will discover a number of common threads. CHArt is privileged to be the forum for such important and fascinating debate.

Digital Creativity

Aesthetics and Interactive Art Karen Cham

Introduction

Any discussion of aesthetics and interactivity must first transgress the divide in modern western Art History between art and technology. Despite the fact that technical principles have always underpinned fine art production (rules of perspective, proportion and the golden section for example) photography, film, television and video are still marginalised in art-historical dialogues. The mechanically-reproduced artefact is easily dismissed in a discourse where value is still equated with dubious concepts of authenticity and originality anchored in production techniques. For example, whilst video art has been part of the art world since the 1960s when artists such as Nam June Paik brought the TV set into the gallery, the aesthetics of video is still neglected in art theory. Not only can video artefacts be mechanically reproduced, but the potential for mass access or worse still, mass appeal, is assumed to negate the exclusivity essential to establishing an aesthetic value. Digital artefacts manifest these two problems of reproduction and access to an even greater extent. A digital artefact, by conventional standards, is even less authentic and original than a mechanically-reproduced one; a true simulation, a mathematical model of the real. Furthermore, not only is the digital artefact accessible by the masses, it is very often interactive, i.e. shaped by audience input; a product of ‘the mass’ itself. These material factors should not inhibit an academic discussion of the aesthetics of interactivity. An aesthetic value is always established by the consensus of an elite. In media studies for example, textual analysis of televisual artefacts clearly demonstrates that, whilst television might appear generally accessible and understood by everyone, there is quite clearly a relative, yet elaborate, aesthetic code operating within a wider, still elite, cultural context.

Art, technology and aesthetics

The inherited divide between art and technology is mapped out comprehensively in Mick Wilson’s paper, How Should We Speak About Art and Technology? where he describes their radical separation as a recent phenomenon, enmeshed within the complex historical process of modernisation. He cites Kristella’s demonstration that the (fine) arts per se were constituted as a separate arena of human endeavour only as late as the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. It is even later, when the term art becomes ‘Art’, associated with creativity, expression, the affective and subjective, that the practice becomes diametrically opposed to the technology. The evolution of technology, whilst encompassing the craft of making, has come to include the tools as well, which have become increasingly scientific.1

Walter Benjamin’s seminal treatise on the convergence of art and technology, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction was published in 1936.2 After tracing the history of reproduction from founding and stamping, through woodcuts, engraving and etching to lithography and photography, he argues that by 1900, technical reproduction had become an artistic medium in its own right. However, he also argues that the presence of an original is a prerequisite to the concepts of authenticity and value, and therefore authenticity and value are outside the realm of technical reproduction.

16  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

Whilst it is easy to anticipate such a conclusion in the early part of the twentieth century, this paradigm has left a tangible inheritance. Video art, for example, has consistently striven to be as different as possible from television in terms of aesthetics, very often to the detriment of the work itself and the absolute alienation of the televisually-eloquent audience. Often this difference has been an unspoken prerequisite of being understood as art at all, the maintenance of the distinction between art and mass culture becoming the key means of ensuring that the work was understood as having value. This type of authenticity and value were then further maintained by ensuring a limited distribution and access giving rise to such conceptual incongruence as video artworks labelled ‘tape 2 – edition of 10’ and screened within a gallery for a limited time.3 Here conditions of production and distribution take precedence, allowing the capitalist dynamics of supply and demand to supplant aesthetics. The term aesthetics actually comes from the Greek ‘aisthetikos’ and was coined by the philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in 1735 to mean the science of how things are known via the senses.4 How then are aesthetics determined? An aesthetic can be driven by the senses, emotions, intellect, will, desires, culture, preferences, subconscious behaviour, conscious decision, training, instinct, sociological institutions, or some complex combination of these, depending on exactly which theory one employs.5 As we can see from the previous example, an aesthetic value can be driven by a complex and convoluted cultural code, and it is probably true to say that all aesthetic judgements are to some extent culturally-conditioned, i.e. linked to judgements of economic, political or moral value. In this way they are also almost always established or upheld by some form of consensus. Aesthetic judgements might then be best understood as based on a consensus about desirable or preferred qualities. For example, whilst the Victorian audience saw African art as ugly, the Edwardians found it beautiful. Digitally-interactive media is a recent development and is defined here as a machine system which reacts in the moment by virtue of automated reasoning based on data from its sensory apparatus.6 Interactivity is most commonly an attribute of serverbased multimedia on the Internet and is a specific attribute of digital media, although interactive systems are not necessarily screen-based. This type of interactivity is new, and the core critical debates centre on how existing paradigms play out in the light of interactivity. How might the paradigms of the past embrace an aesthetics of mechanicallyreproduced artefacts, of the media and the new interactivity? What methodologies can accommodate a trans-disciplinary aesthetic not only to include the Lascaux cave paintings and the Sistine Chapel ceiling, African art and Japanese woodcuts, but also Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and the avatars of Linden Lab’s secondlife.com (est. 2003);

Ihnatowicz’s Senster (1970) and Verhoeven’s RoboCop (1987); Pac Man (Namco, 1979) and Toshio Iwai’s Resonance of Four (1994); Paul Sermon’s Telematic Dreaming (1992) and Big Brother (Endemol, 2005). Mechanical reproduction has indeed seen Benjamin’s ‘feared art of the proletariat’ come to fruition. In order to overcome this divide and see old and new cultures as a continuum, Lev Manovich proposes in Post Media Aesthetics (2001) that we should use categories that describe how a cultural object organises and structures users’ experience of data.7 For example, Giotto is not just an early Renaissance painter but an information designer demonstrating new ways to organise data within a static two-dimensional surface. This approach to visual artefacts is in fact pre-dated by the New Art History of the 1970s and 80s as represented by BLOCK magazine.8 This school of thought aimed to promote a new perspective of understanding art as a social practice, conditioned by social, economic and ideological factors. It was to be studied within a broader anthropological notion of culture, where all forms of representation are understood as a structure and process of ideology.9 Visual Culture, as this field of study came to be known, is now conventionally where art, design and media artefacts are seen as part of a larger cultural history and the whole of cultural production and consumption is subsumed into particular instances of the dialogic sign systems of society. For example, a television show, painting or traditional costume could all be addressed from a common methodological basis. The common use of structural analysis to deconstruct and analyse the social/ communicative function of cultural artefacts gives particular focus to the reader’s experience of the structure of a text (Manovich’s ‘user’, ‘organization’ and ‘data’ respectively). So does this mean visual culture already accounts not only for Manovich’s post-media aesthetics but also for interactivity?

Media negation

Aesthetics and Interactive Art  17

It is clear how both of these approaches, focusing on generic attributes of artefacts, could offer a methodological approach to underpin a coherent assessment of the socio-cultural/communicative aspects of the aesthetics of interactive art. However, one major difficulty stands in the way; both share a common ground in rejecting the tradition of an aesthetic anchored in material qualities. Manovich argues that the traditional aesthetic divide of art production on the basis of medium (i.e. painting, sculpture, drawing), is based on differences in materials, and that as digital technology has erased the differences between photography, painting, film and animation etc. and established the multimedia document as a new integrated standard, the key concept of an artistic medium is rendered useless. He concludes that as all Human Computer Interaction (HCI) is interactive, ‘interactivity’ itself is a meaningless category, stating a basic fact about computers. This presents a huge problem, right at the heart of the matter. If an aesthetic is something ‘apprehended by the senses’ then it necessarily has a material base, even when that base is ‘virtual’ (digital). How can one legitimately address an aesthetic without to some extent addressing the medium? Corbett goes so far as to state that it may mean that it is impossible to assess the work as a visual artefact at all.10

The common rejection of media-based taxonomies appears to stem from a misapprehension of structural analysis as a type of formalism where an intrinsic, fixed and universal relationship between the artistic sign and its referent11 is insisted upon. We know from structuralism, and not least our own experience, that this is patently not true; the meaning of an artefact is in constant flux, synchronically and diachronically, across different groups of people and across time. An image of an aircraft, for example, prior to September 11, had a dramatically different body of connotations to the same image since that date and for some time afterwards. In Post Media Aesthetics, Manovich himself adopts a formalist perspective when he describes the medium (paint) as the sign and its representational capacities (paintings of things) as the referent.12 In my understanding of post-structuralist semiotics the paint is not the sign and the painting is not the referent; the sign is what the medium (paint) is used to physically represent (painting of an aircraft) and the referent is the attendant concept (the aircraft) of that sign. Furthermore, if one eradicates the notion of the medium in this way, ironically, one eradicates the possibility of a workable notion of interface.

18  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

So, whilst it is not difficult to appreciate Giotto’s contribution to information design, what cannot be addressed by Manovich’s proposal is the specific fact that Giotto organised aesthetic data using the medium of paint; that Giotto was a painter. This by definition means that we cannot address the specifics of the medium of interactivity at all as it is not here recognised as having any material specificity. Indeed, by only recognising (machinic) mediation13 from lithography onwards, even Benjamin fails to account for the already-mediated nature of art. The void between aesthetics and interactivity is where the medium should sit. The void is there first because photography, cinema, television, video and interactive media have been excluded from originality, authenticity and aesthetic value by nature of their material. Second, it is reinforced by a will to break from the traditions of the old Art History and its concern with material, and finally it is compounded by the very nature of digital media that according to Manovich have no material quality. How is it possible that theoretically there can be no aesthetics of interactive art when in practice there quite clearly is?

Rebooting media aesthetics

The underlying issue here is that when technological innovation, such as has been witnessed during the last century, reaches the velocity of the last ten years then theory must be willing to learn from practice. The paradigms of the past are no longer driving artistic production; technological innovations are. Examples of soft and hard technological determinism are multitudinous from across the spectrum of society, industry and the arts. How can we legitimately explore aesthetics and interactive art without making any reference whatsoever to the innovation of new aesthetics for interaction in the field for applications such as computer games, websites, and mobile phones? It is work that lives out the aesthetic paradigms of Dada and Surrealism, Futurism, Jazz, Fluxus, Punk, Situationism and Pop Art amongst others. How better to bankrupt our own discipline

at this crucial time? These technically-driven aesthetic innovations are most definitely within the field; the ‘old’ field of fine and applied visual arts. Contemporary cultural producers are ‘within the sign’ (Derrida) in that we create new artefacts from ‘secondary’ (mediated) sources rather than primary ones; this is the postmodern condition and is inextricably linked to technologies of reproduction, distribution and interaction. As Benjamin pointed out, the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. Does this absence of the original hinder the apprehension of the aesthetics of a photograph, a television advertisement or a computer game? Hardly. Techniques such as collage, montage, assemblage, sampling and remixing have driven new aesthetic concepts such as simulacra, immersion, networks and embodiment. It is an aesthetic that traverses and includes the aesthetics of the commercial media and the new media (Bolter’s remediation). Benjamin’s insistence on an artwork’s aesthetic value stemming from its ‘presence in time and space’ has been extended to encompass a virtual presence; the aesthetic qualities of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling are part of my aesthetic canon from the many reproductions I have seen. I have never been to Italy. The Visual Culture approach is indeed pragmatic enough to meet the challenge of the diversity of aesthetic practices in the digital age. It is also insightful and useful to understand the function of an aesthetic in its social, political and economic context. The only flaw of the ‘New Art History’ as an appropriate theoretical methodology for this purpose is in its rejection of the object. The old Art History’s idea of an aesthetic anchored in the object is invariably tied to practice, to process, to materials. However, in a postmodern culture the medium is no longer a quality of the object. There is no object, no original, no presence in space or time, only mediation. Whilst postmodern notions of simulacra account for such a position philosophically, ironically it is the oldest sense of art as making or doing (technology) that can perhaps facilitate the best attempt to accommodate such radical notions aesthetically.

Conclusion

However, there are now abundant autonomous theories of the aesthetics of interactivity across an entire spectrum – ranging from the stubborn conviction that all media have always been interactive which does nothing to assist serious analysis and understanding of the specifics of digital interactivity – to reasonable ideas of remediation (Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin) – to full blown radical ideas of cyberculture (Roy Ascott) and posthumanism (N. Katherine Hayles) which, whilst intellectually important, can be difficult to apply tangibly to the more basic questions of aesthetics.

Aesthetics and Interactive Art  19

Visual Culture still provides useful theoretical models for addressing the sociocultural context and function of such artefacts, irrespective of the material base and/or presence in time and space. Manovich’s work is important in that it acknowledges that something is definitely new about interactivity and that it is important for Art History, curation and practice to develop some form of theoretical continuum from painting to interactivity. Benjamin’s work is important here too in recognising some fundamental aspects of the mechanically-reproduced artefact.

What can also be asserted is that the past does not need to be reappraised using metaphors from the digital age. To propose that we redress the whole of Art History through the myopic optic of computer terminology is perverse semantics. Equally, to attempt to apply the digital experience of interactivity to books and paintings serves no useful purpose. A viable post-media aesthetics needs to be entirely focused upon the material of mediation in order to anchor art, design and media practice in creative processes and provide the continuum that transcends time, from red ochre to silver halides to hypertext, especially when the medium is not always a quality of the object but sometimes a reality in its own right. That is, a media-based approach to the aesthetics of interactive art, marrying the Visual Culture perspective to an art-historical concept of the medium, could apprehend divergent manifestations from the same material base in specific social contexts. Only in this way can I, for example, comprehensively understand my own work, the particular nature of the materials I work with and the context within which that work is conceived, created and apprehended. Thus Ihnatowicz’s Senster, constructed from steel tubes and controlled by a Philips P9201 computer using input from two microphones and two radar sensors on its head, is an early prototype for the key aesthetics of interactivity in the field of transparency of interaction and anthropomorphism of the interface.15 It also incorporates aesthetic references to the contemporary cultural aesthetics of electricity pylons and sciencefiction characters. These are generated respectively by the increasing industrialisation of the urban landscape and the prolific representation of scientific developments derived from the ‘space race’ in popular culture narratives since the 1950s. Simple isn’t it.16

Notes   1. Wilson, M. (2001), ‘How Should We Speak About Art and Technology?’, Crossings: Journal of Art and Technology, 1:1. http://crossings.tcd.ie/issues/1.1/Wilson/ (active 21 April 2008).

20  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

  2. Benjamin, W. [1936] (1973), ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Illuminations, Arendt, H., (ed.) translated by Zohn, H., London: Fontana, pp. 219–253.   3. Manovich, L. (2001), Post Media Aesthetics, www.manovich.net (active 21 April 2008).   4.  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesthetics (active 21 April 2008).

  5.  Korsmeyer, C., (ed.), (1998), Aesthetics: The Big Questions, Malden, Mass., Oxford: Blackwell.

  6. Penny, S. (1996), ‘From A to D and Back Again: The Emerging Aesthetics of Interactive Art’, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, 4.4, April, available at http://leoalmanac.org/journal/Vol_4/ lea_v4_n04.txt (active 28 May 2008).   7.  Manovich, L. (2001), Post Media Aesthetics, www.manovich.net (active 21 April 2008).

  8. Corbett, D.P. (2005), ‘Visual Culture and the History of Art’, Dealing with the Visual: Art History, Aesthetics and Visual Culture, Van Eck, C. and Winters, E. (eds), Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 209–241.

  9. Corbett, D.P. (2005), ‘Visual Culture and the History of Art’, Dealing with the Visual: Art History, Aesthetics and Visual Culture, Van Eck, C. and Winters, E. (eds), Aldershot: Ashgate, p. 19.

10. Corbett, D.P. (2005), ‘Visual Culture and the History of Art’, Dealing with the Visual: Art History, Aesthetics and Visual Culture, Van Eck, C. and Winters, E. (eds), Aldershot: Ashgate, p. 22.

11. Aguirre, I. (2004), ‘Beyond Understanding Visual Culture’, Jade, 23.3.

12. Manovich, L. (2001), Post Media Aesthetics, www.manovich.net (active 21 April 2008).

13. Poster, M. (2002), ‘The Aesthetics of Distracting Media’, Culture Machine, 4. www.culture machine.tees.ac.uk (active 28 May 2008). 14. Bolton, J.D. and R. Grusin (1999), Remediation. Understanding New Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

15. The Senster homepage is at http://www.senster.com/ihnatowicz/senster/sensterelectronics/ index.htm (active 21 April 2008).

16. Boden, M. (2005), ‘Aesthetics and Interactive Art’, Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Creativity and Cognition, New York: ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), available at http:// portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1056225&dl=ACM&coll=ACM (active 28 May 2008).

Aesthetics and Interactive Art  21

A Blueprint for Bacterial Life: Can A Science-art Fusion Move the Boundaries of Visual and Audio Interpretation? Elaine Shemilt

I am a fine art printmaker although my work extends to installation and film, often with the use of sound. In recent years I have worked in collaboration with scientific colleagues at the Scottish Crop Research Institute (SCRI) who have sequenced a bacterial plant pathogen for the first time in the United Kingdom. This is also the first inter-bacterial plant pathogen to be sequenced worldwide. The analytical tool that was developed by the SRCI, GenomeDiagram, is probably the most advanced comparative genomics visualisation tool available worldwide and it is being adopted by an increasing number of genomics laboratories internationally, including the Sanger Institute in Cambridge and the Universities of Minnesota and Madison in the United States. Initially I was approached by Dr Michel Perombelon with a view to collaboration, in the hope that artistic expression, communication and methodologies might help the wider community understand this complex scientific discovery and at the same time generally raise awareness of the research at SCRI. For my part, I was particularly interested in looking into the question of whether a science-art fusion could move the boundaries of visual and audio interpretation. During a pilot study something occurred which made us realise that our collaboration reached beyond the initial objective into deeper research issues on the possible usefulness of artistic methodologies. That is, the role of the artist in the visualisation of complex data, and the subsequent impact upon scientific understanding and insights. As an artist, I found the images that the scientists created in order to represent the genetic data very beautiful and without a doubt they lent themselves to artistic expression and exploration. Immediately, however, a question arose. Could the collection and visualisation of a huge amount of data derived from the study of a genome really enable the production of works of art with high impact and resonance? More generally, what are the effects of artistic expression, communication and methodologies on our understanding of complex scientific discoveries? Science-art projects are commonplace now and there are various ongoing debates. I refer back, for example, to C. P. Snow, who proposed the existence of ‘two cultures’.1 However, encouraged by our initial discovery, added to by our particular combination of expertise and now firmly-established teamwork, we believe that our collaboration contests this view and that is the basis of this paper.

Fig. 1  Elaine Shemilt, E. Coli 1. © Elaine Shemilt.

24  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

Printmaking has been referred to as the ‘poor man’s painting’, but this pejorative phrase indicates an underestimation of the discipline. Maybe, more correctly, printmaking should be described as a group of media, which utilise ancient and modern techniques and technologies. This would include my own definition of printmaking, which amongst other things attempts to convey complex ideas and insights or may simply present data as digital animation. At the SCRI Dr Pritchard works at the interface between biology and computing. His first thoughts when this project was suggested concerned the aesthetic value inherently present in scientific information, even in the absence of a context. The presentation of scientific information has a deserved reputation for being literal and representational, with a minimum of embellishment and extrapolation. This is required for the clear and precise dissemination of information. The guiding theme in preparing scientific figures for publication is often that they should be interpretable without reference to the main text.

What exactly is ‘print’?

An edition, in printmaking terms, is a numbered set of identical prints. In commercial terms, the numbering is a safeguard of the value of the prints, and professional artists’ plates or blocks are cancelled after an edition has been completed. This convention adds the necessary ‘aura’ (in Walter Benjamin’s famous use of the term) to make each single print a work of art.2 This tradition of limitation continues but seems barely relevant in what I have recognised through my practice over the past thirty years. For me, contemporary printmaking is neither defined nor confined by tradition or medium. The essence of contemporary printmaking lies in a process of empirical experimentation, discovery, analysis, resolution and critical reflection – the pursuit of the image – the unlimited image. The limitations placed upon the artist in this sense, therefore, are mostly technical. The best printmakers make art that goes beyond the limitations and

Fig. 2  Elaine Shemilt, E. Coli 2. © Elaine Shemilt.

continues to break with tradition. However, in order to illustrate the impact that successive technological breakthroughs have had on printmaking it is perhaps important to note the most significant breakthroughs in this tradition. I hope that the following potted history of printmaking will offer an insight into how artistic reinterpretation can enhance understanding and offer new insights into routes for the analysis of scientific data. Mechanical western printmaking was invented early in the middle ages with the woodcut. Printmaking quickly developed as the first efficient way of imparting information and ideas, and especially by the Christian church for the motivation of piety and reflection. However, the woodcut, which was the primary early print medium, was a rather crude vehicle. The very nature of the process meant that the viewer was not provided with much more information than an iconic or simple graphical representation of the object depicted. Further information such as perspective or temporal issues was restricted. It would take the ‘new’ concepts of the Renaissance to ensure that new techniques and technologies were developed in order to transmit more complex information.

The next major printmaking breakthrough came at the beginning of the nineteenth century when Aloys Senefelder (1771–1834) developed lithography. Over a period of fifteen years, through a wonderful mixture of chemistry and physics with art, craft, skill and luck, Senefelder made it possible to print multiples of an illustration drawn upon a perfectly flat stone surface. He was a Bavarian dramatist who found it too expensive

A Blueprint for Bacterial Life  25

As time went on the means of printmaking developed to include copper engraving, then etching, then wood engraving. The world was changing even though Galileo might recant his ‘heresy’ that the earth was not the centre of the universe. The media theorist Marshall McLuhan claimed that ‘the increasing precision and quantity of visual information transformed the print into a three-dimensional world of perspective and fixed point of view.’3

Fig. 3  Elaine Shemilt, Etching. © Elaine Shemilt.

to make enough copies of his plays for his actors. Lithography is the result of his search for a cheap means to do this. Lithography is a natural process for the draughtsman as of all the printmaking processes it is most like drawing. The artist could work with pencil, ink or crayon. Unlike etching, where the artist uses a needle to draw through a wax ground onto metal before putting the plate into acid, with lithography the artist makes the tonal variation and nuance of the mark at the time of drawing.

26  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

Stone lithography became widely popular towards the end of the nineteenth and right through the twentieth century. As a result of this breakthrough, a revolution in the dissemination of images became possible, including offset lithography, utilising thin metal plates and high-speed printing machines, along with the photographic transfer of images. This dramatic development in the pre-electronic age is repeated by the new ‘stone’ of the latter half of the twentieth century (the digital age): silicon, with the opportunities it gives to combine art with electronics, algorithms and binary code. The silicon chip has reinvented print and brought with it the next revolution in image production, manipulation, dissemination and distribution; in short – contemporary printmaking. It is important to recognise that the basis of artists’ printmaking still relies on the traditional crafts of woodcut, linoleum block, etching, stone lithography and screenprinting. But the artist-printmaker’s knowledge, skill, artistic integrity and determination means that at the beginning of this new century many are using these techniques combined with digital imaging processes to address new dimensions and contexts. Photomechanical techniques were a printmaking mark of twentieth century art. In the twenty-first century we are in an age of electronic and digital technology, new media, and installation strategies.

Fig. 4  Elaine Shemilt, Rings Rays. © Elaine Shemilt.

Currently artist-printmakers define themselves in many different ways. There is now renewed interest in traditional techniques such as mezzotint, chine collé and photogravure, whilst simultaneously there are rapid developments in the field of non-toxic printmaking technologies. Again, remembering those early experiments by Senefelder, printmakers now appropriate materials such as photo-polymers and commercial silicon to develop new methods of printmaking.

Although the installation ‘event’ is inevitably lost, the creative dynamic continues as themes and subjects occur and re-occur through the various media. In scientific terms this might be thought of as a transition or ‘tipping point’ where new possibilities open up. This is where the science takes precedence. Dr Ian Toth is an expert on bacterial pathogenesis, molecular approaches to host/pathogen interaction, genome sequencing and functional genomics. Dr Leighton Pritchard, as mentioned before, is a scientist working at the interface of biology and computer science (and the

A Blueprint for Bacterial Life  27

So we have established that from the medieval period (in western art), artists have made prints. With the advent of digital technology contemporary printmaking incorporates ancient and modern techniques and allows for an increasing precision and quantity of visual information to convey complex ideas and insights. In the past I have created largescale installations using printed elements on different materials. Various printmaking methods (including digital media) were used in an attempt to continue and develop the work of the installations, rather than to record an event simply by documentary photography. To refer again to Walter Benjamin, this relates to his comment that ‘even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.’4

28  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

Fig. 5  Elaine Shemilt, Installation. © Elaine Shemilt.

creator of GenomeDiagram) concentrating on how micro-organisms cause disease in plants.  Both scientists won the international race to sequence a plant pathogen from the same family as E.coli and the Black Death bacterium. They pioneered the software GenomeDiagram, which enables simultaneous visualisation of billions of gene comparisons of hundreds of fully-sequenced bacterial genomes, including those of animal and plant pathogens. The results have helped to identify the acquisition of foreign DNA by pathogens, potentially representing novel mechanisms involved in disease (represented by clearly defined white ‘spokes’ radiating from the centre of the image. They have also helped to trace the evolution of this gene acquisition (and loss) over millions of years. Black Death (Yersinia pestis) and Blackleg (Erwinia), diseases of humans and potatoes respectively, seem worlds apart but without this foreign DNA these bacteria are remarkably similar. At root, DNA transfer is the single most significant source of the outward differences between the diseases caused by these closely-related bacteria. The acquisition of foreign DNA may culminate in a microbe changing into either a human or plant pathogen, the point at which this occurs again being a ‘tipping point’ in that microbe’s evolution. This foreign DNA in turn leads to novel biological traits being introduced into the microbe and incorporated into existing regulatory circuits such as quorum sensing. As pathogen populations grow in their host, they produce a regulatory hormone that gradually increases in concentration. At a critical (or quorate) population, the concentration of that regulator hormone becomes sufficient to trigger a series of events essential to symptom development and disease initiation. The point at which this trigger occurs and true disease begins is yet again a ‘tipping point’, this time dividing invasion from the successful outcome of disease. Thus ‘tipping points’ in both the visualisation of biological data and in the biology itself can be related to the artistic event. Genome diagrams, even in their scientific context, are fairly abstract figures. These ‘maps’, after all, represent biological concepts that do not really exist. Most of the processes and entities with which modern micro-biology concerns itself are invisible

to the naked eye. Aspects of genomics are similarly invisible. Each genome is the result of four billion or so years of evolution. My first experiments began with a series of prints where I removed all trace of the relationship of the GenomeDiagram to the thing it described. It was a scientific image stripped of its contextualising information. In other words the image, a circular map of genes and their relationship to other bacteria, represented something essentially invisible that could only be ‘seen’ in an abstract representation. Then I concentrated on subtleties of colour and tonal variation. I began by focusing on the precision and quantity of visual information and I created a series of etchings, screen-prints and animations. With the screen-prints I used a very subtle range of silvery blues and greys and worked with some very specific inks (known in the trade as interference inks – these have a slight three-dimensional quality.) It was from looking at those prints that the scientists noticed the occurrence of new elements and a very specific event of gene acquisition. My approach was to simplify the diagram into a tonal variation and in so doing I re-contextualised the data in such a way that it revealed information that the scientists had completely overlooked. Their scientific approach to the data was systematic and empirical. Purely by chance, my artistic re-interpretation of the scientific data contributed to a new insight. Rather than simply identifying genes unique to a pathogen, the screen-prints revealed the presence of other genes in all of the bacteria, possibly representing genes essential to all forms of bacteria. As far as we were concerned this was a breakthrough. It was as though our project drew a comparison between the genome diagram and the work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility. I refer again of course to Walter Benjamin’s essay. We had taken this scientific visualisation tool outside the fields of biology and medicine and placed it in the context of interdisciplinary art. Inspired by this we are now exploring the dynamic nature of biological systems using both visual and sound disciplines (and their associated media), and we are going beyond obvious interpretative frameworks. Our goal is to ensure that the relationship of the artwork to the data is reflected and maintained not merely as content but also as elements and structural process.

In recent years the rapid development of computer technology and computer graphics has enabled advanced visualisation techniques; an essential part of the huge datagenerating potential of genomic technologies. Both scientists and artists are exploiting the latest technologies. Our project enables scientists and artists to share and resolve problems surrounding current uses of visual and audio-visual techniques from different perspectives.

A Blueprint for Bacterial Life  29

Walter Benjamin used the term ‘aura’ to refer to the feeling of awe created by unique or remarkable objects such as works of art or relics of the past. He argued that the proliferation of mass production and reproduction technologies harboured the potential elimination of reflection and imagination causing the decay of the ‘aura’. As a printmaker I use current reproduction techniques that allow for a rich diversity of visualisation in order to address this idea of the ‘aura’.

Fig. 6  Elaine Shemilt, Linear Screen. © Elaine Shemilt.

In the pilot stage we dealt with the linear data of the genome sequence, creating images, animations and simple sound based upon the data translated through MIDI. We aim to progress to more complex systems arising from the sequences’ emergent properties.

30  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

I noticed that the DNA image resembled a score of music. It was a tenuous idea, but as Dr Leighton Pritchard trained originally as a chemist and has a view of biological information that is correspondingly physical and chemical he was ready to engage with such a concept. By using a series of mathematical notations he translated the different amino acid letters into sequences of musical notes. I quote: Aside from the biological and physical meaning of this letter ‘A’ inside the computer, it is not even represented as a letter. When my finger hits the ‘A’ key on the keyboard it initiates a series of electrical pulses. These pulses are interpreted by the computer as a binary number. When we need to ‘write’ the character to the screen, a different series of electrical pulses is used. These represent not the letter itself, but an image – patches of light and dark on a larger canvas. The use of different font types will result in different patterns, and so different pulses, but still the same recognisable symbol. These representations are at once inexact but precise.

My daughter Genevieve, who is a music student at the Birmingham Conservatoire started to work on Leighton’s musical note sequences. By developing the scale, tonality and starting octave of the melody, and the intervals for each base transition she succeeded in translating it into the auditory sphere. We used the findings from my prints and this new work to gain our first art-science grant from the Mylnefield Trust. When the data is set out in a linear way it has a musical appearance whereas genomics are non-linear or may perhaps be better described as simultaneous events – with very

different ‘musical’ or time structures. This leads to the idea of soundscape(s) where all component elements are present at any point on a timeline (structurally more like a painting or print than music) but fluid or not fixed. As well as the animations and music, we are now developing the concept of GenomeDiagram into a multimedia installation event based on the genetic plasticity and evolution of bacterial pathogens. To further develop this we have recently involved the soundscape artist David Cunningham. David Cunningham works with the creation and manipulation of sound by electronic and acoustic processes with a particular emphasis on the integrity of the materials, their innate structure and context. This emphasis on process is a key element in this project, an approach that can creatively maintain the precision of the source data. The primary motivation for developing the installation is to introduce sound and spatial aspects through open, interrogative and responsive modes of thinking, experimentation, processes and techniques, involving time and space. A unifying thread of our research is that by de-contextualising scientific data, we obtain a complementary viewpoint to the scientific interpretation. Fine art practice emphasises subjectivity and ambiguity whereas science practice attempts to identify objective truths. Despite the contrast between the two approaches they can be unified because both disciplines thrive on lateral thinking and observation. As well as refining our mechanisms for creative development, our collaboration aims to enhance scientific visualisation of complex data, and for it to impact upon scientific understanding and insights. Common to both artists and scientists is the use of advanced visualisation tools and the principles of new media as defined by Lev Manovich: ‘Numerical representation; modularity; automation; variability; and cultural transcoding.’5 Research development will also continue to involve production, analysis of visualisations in print, digital imaging, high definition 2D and 3D animation and sound. By using animation to create time-lapse video clips we will create new dimensions for the expression and interpretation of the data. Our test animations already show movement and uptake/deletion of foreign DNA.

By way of a conclusion I would like to offer this thought. The development of printmaking has enabled a reinvention of the artist’s language. What does the aesthetic manipulation of the image look like in the twenty-first century? To a greater or lesser extent in a culture such as ours, artists will always continue to strive to communicate on social and psychological levels. With the advent of digital technology printmakers can go as far as any artist is capable of going. They can create continuous experiences of moving time and space: a simulation of human consciousness through technology. ‘A blueprint for bacterial life and art.’ So much for the ‘poor man’s painting’.

A Blueprint for Bacterial Life  31

The impact of hybrid technology on the language of the artist has been profound. If the computer outputs from the analysis of the genome sequence are translated into art, we think that we can show that it is possible to aid in the discovery of new pathogenicity determinants. At the same time my challenge as an artist is to make sure that the data – derived from the study of a genome, the scientific process, and analysis – enables the production of works of art.

Notes 1. At the 1959 University of Cambridge Rede Lecture, C.P. Snow delivered a paper lamenting the cultural divide between scientists and non-scientists in western society. Snow, C.P. (1993), The Two Cultures, Cambridge University Press; contains Snow’s 1959 Rede lecture, and The Two Cultures: A Second Look, originally published in 1964. 2. Benjamin, W., [1936] (1973), ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Illuminations, ed. by Arendt, H., trans. by Zohn, H., London: Fontana. 3.  McLuhan, M. (1964), Understanding Media, Routledge and Kegan Paul: London, p. 173.

4. Benjamin, W., [1936] (1973), ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Illuminations, ed. by Arendt, H., trans. by Zohn, H., London: Fontana.

32  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

5.  Manovich, L. (2001), The Language of New Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 20.

Invisible Work: The Representation of Artistic Practice in Digital Visual Culture Ann-Sophie Lehmann

The construction of digital artworks demands a wide range of expertise. Conception, production and technology are closely intertwined; existing technologies have to be adapted to new artistic concepts, and new technologies inspire and create new meanings, iconologies and contexts. In order to realise a work of art – be it an installation in a gallery or museum, or an online work – an artist has to be engineer, programmer, graphic designer, and hardware constructor all at once, or has to have access to others who are able to shape technologies and materials as required. In the case of Daniel Rozin’s Wooden Mirror (1999) for example – a work that produces the reflection of any person facing it by slightly shifting the polished wooden blocks of which the surface of the mirror is constructed – the cameras, motion sensors, software and wooden blocks were all custom made.1 In a sense, the construction of such complex, interactive works returns the digitalmedia artist to an era before the pre-manufacturing of artist’s supplies. Before the invention of metal paint tubes in the nineteenth century, before standard-sized canvases or marble blocks were available, artists depended on custom-made materials, and workshops with trained assistants, just as the media artist today might depend on programmers and engineers to provide custom-built technology. Even when artist and programmer are the same person, for example the Net art practitioners Jodi (http://text.jodi.org/) or Olia Lialina (www.artlebedev.ru/svalka/olialia/), the procedures of art-making are no less intricate or complex. Thinking about the versatile practice of new media artists leads to the question of what this practice might look like. One way to find out is by studio visits or reading and listening to interviews with artists.2 Another way is to look at the ways media artists represent their own practice. Throughout history, artists have always taken care to display and advertise their art-making skills in genres specifically created for this purpose. Some of the first representations of artists at work may be found in illuminated manuscripts and in the early Renaissance the representation of St. Luke painting the Madonna became a way to depict artistic practice and skill. Within a century the Christian iconography of the painting apostle evolved into the independent self-portrait at the easel, and the atelier scene. Both genres were still widely popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, adapting their specific iconography to changing artistic practice or new technologies. Considering today’s multi-faceted media artist as described above, one could expect a continuation of the iconography of ‘the artist at work’ into the digital age. But is practice represented in the age of digital art? Do artists draw attention to the processes and procedures of their work? The question about a contemporary iconography of the representation of practice raises more general questions about the spatial, material and theoretical aspects of contemporary artistic

practice: what kind of materials and tools are used to construct media art and how do artists employ these tools and materials in their creative spaces? How are these creative spaces defined and located, and can they and the creative processes within be visualised? My first tentative answer to these questions is negative – digital modes of production do not appear to favour the representation of the artist at work because the very process of making is rendered invisible by the medium itself. However, this hypothesis must be tested. In order to determine whether or not representation of practice is absent in the creation of digital art, this article will reflect on four aspects relevant to the question at stake. Beginning with a short analysis of the meaning of representations of artistic practice in the pre-digital era, a more thorough analysis of the location and designation of creative spaces in the digital era will follow. The representation of digital tools and materials used by media artists will then be focused on, incorporating a brief comparison with the representation of practice in a field related to media art – computer graphics and animation.

34  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

The representation of artistic practice and creative spaces in the pre-digital era

In the pre-photographic era artistic practice – especially painterly practice – was represented in genres displaying artists working at their easels in their workshops (Fig. 1). Needless to say, these scenes are not objective representations of generic practices, but carefully staged scenes designed to entice the viewer with the display of artistic skill.3 At the same time, these scenes served to invest an artist’s working space with near magical qualities. The careful presentation of the ‘artist at work’ with brushes and paints (or their equivalents), in a studio space adorned with models, preliminary sketches and unfinished works, evoked the aura of creation. The images suggested that these spaces not only contained the materials and tools necessary to make works of art, but also housed the inspiration and genius necessary to conceive them. Furthermore, the images enhanced the mystery of artistic creation through an interesting pictorial paradox. On one hand, atelier scenes allow us to witness the act of creating a painting, seemingly instructing the viewer in the actual making of pictorial illusions. Yet while we appear to observe the processes of painting – a brushstroke being made or paint being mixed – the acts displayed before our eyes could never be copied purely based on this visual information. Therefore, the visual representation of making art does not give away the artist’s secret of how to make art. Consequently, the visualised process of creation becomes all the more mysterious. Later, photography and film would replace the handmade depiction of the skilful self at work. Here, the creative process was made visible to the public, seemingly unravelling the mystery of art-making, while heightening the magical element of creation. To this day, the studio space lends itself to the idealisation and mystification of practice, and the physical presence of the atelier is associated with the imaginary presence of the creative process. Even with the artist dead and gone, the deserted studio continues to breathe the aura of creation and is treated as a shrine, with the material remains as relics. The recent transfer of Francis Bacon’s entire studio contents from London to Dublin, and the exhibition of Perry Ogden’s beautiful photographs of the chaotic workshop, as works of art in their own right, is a perfect example of the cultural value attached to the traditional creative environment.4

Fig. 1  Sofonisba Anguissola, Self-portrait at the Easel, 1556, Muzeum-Zamek, Ła´ncut, Poland. Reproduced with kind permission.

In conclusion it may be stated that until very recently, the representation of practice was closely tied to the aura of material practice. This ‘materialist’ notion is incorporated in the very naming of the artist’s space: the term atelier derives from the Latin atele, which referred to the wooden shavings in a carpenter’s workshop.

The designation and location of creative spaces in the digital era

New media have led to the formation of new creative spaces; spaces that seem to have caused a dislocation of the materiality of the traditional working space. In order to locate digital artistic practice and its representation, this section will attempt to trace and outline the physical, metaphorical and theoretical appearances of these new spaces.

Invisible Work  35

Beginning with the designation of the new spaces, it is remarkable that in new media art practice, a working space is frequently referred to as a laboratory rather than a studio or atelier. Often abbreviated as media lab or design lab, the new working space is a sharp contrast to the traditional concept of the studio. Obviously, this shift owes much to the essential role of technology in new media art. Also the notion of creation associated with the traditional studio might be less appealing than the notion of experiment associated with the laboratory. Yet the laboratory, just like the studio, carries its own traditional set of connotations which are deemed highly problematic by some scholars. In science and technology studies – most prominently by Bruno Latour – the laboratory has been criticised as the ultimate black box. Latour characterised the laboratory as a place where experiment and invention are kept from public view, and only finite results are allowed to emerge after having been carefully wrapped in impenetrable layers of scientific reasoning.5 Although the artist’s laboratory has come to signify the cross-disciplinary link between art and science and could therefore symbolise a partial opening of the

black box, the production and making of art still seems to be hidden behind the walls of the lab. Consequently, there is no equivalent to the traditional depiction of the atelier described above; no laboratory-iconography representing the work that goes on inside. This obscuring of creative practice is matched by an apparent reluctance to describe the technological processes behind digital artworks with words.

36  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

In recent overviews of new media art, very little attention is paid to the actual production of the artworks discussed.6 For example, although Net art plays with digital technologies or addresses their impact on art, society and politics, the actual technologies and procedures behind the individual artworks remain obscure. Artists simply ‘draw links between sites’; ‘build online artworks’; or present ‘a sophisticated piece of programming’.7 In the few instances where artists refer to their own practice, we get a notion of their presence behind the computer, yet we have no idea what they actually do with the computer. In a 1997 interview Net art pioneer Vuk Cosic describes how he has neighbouring studios with Heath Bunting, Alexei Shulgin and Olia Lialina, emulating the studio setup of Picasso and Braque in early twentieth century Paris: ‘We steal a lot from each other, in the sense that we take some parts of codes, we admire each other’s tricks’. The Belgian duo Jodi wrote in the early 1990s: ‘it is obvious that our work fights against high-tech’.8 The drawing and building, the comparison with Braque and Picasso, the fight against ‘high-tech’ draws on traditional terminology and metaphors. The vocabulary for the description of the technological aspects of new media art practice on the other hand is limited. So how do we imagine the code-tricks Cosic mentions? How do we differentiate between high- and lowtech if technology is neither a verbal nor visual issue in the self-reflection of practice, and in the critical analysis and public presentation of art works? Maybe technology is still considered dull to the wider public? The result being that ‘techno-talk’ is consequently kept to a relatively small, artistic community that possesses sufficient technological understanding. It is interesting to note that the notion of the laboratory with its metaphorical connotations of secrecy and highly specialised technological processes, in combination with the textual silence surrounding these processes, contradicts a vital ideal proclaimed by new media culture and theory. This ideal envisages new media as open-source, enabling technologies, which (ideally) facilitate and inspire the participatory production of culture.9 This contradiction between the ‘black boxing’ of artistic practice and the ideal of a participatory culture might be owing to the mechanisms of the art market – above all the demand for originality – to which eventually even the most non-conformist artist may succumb. In order to solve this conflict, open the ‘black box of practice’ and represent the new media artist at work, a means to facilitate the description and visualisation of the technologies used in art practice must be found. In addition to the symbolic and physical shift of the site of production from open studio to closed laboratory, new media have had a more profound impact on the notion of space. On a theoretical level, new media have divided the notion of space into metaphorical and/or virtual spaces on one hand and actual, physical spaces on the other.10 The inherent dichotomy of real and non-real spaces, as argued by new media theorists such as N. Katherine Hayles and Mark Poster, should be discarded in favour of

a model they base upon Michel Foucault’s concept of a heterotopia. This model suggests that through new media, virtual and physical spaces intersect each other simultaneously, continuously creating new spaces, all of which co-exist in a non-hierarchical structure.11 New media artworks are a perfect illustration of these new spatial heterotopias. In new media art works – as George Legrady, theorist and practitioner in the field of digital media, pointed out as early as 1999 – metaphorical and virtual spaces always intersect with physical spaces: ‘In the process of interacting with the digital world, we can consider real space as the site where our bodies come into contact with the technological devices by which we experience virtual space’.12 Legrady points out the embodied visual or sensual experience of the viewer when looking at new media art in physical spaces like museums but also on computer screens. The artworks themselves, however, are, as he emphasises, immaterial: ‘Artists who create in digital media can produce works that do not require embodiment in a physical object. These works are free from the constraints of materiality as they exist as numeric data […]’.13 Legrady argues that the artwork, ‘free from the constraints of materiality’ arrives at an intersection of the virtual and the real when it is being viewed and experienced. In his argument, Legrady puts the immateriality of the artwork first, but what about the other end of the process; the initial making of the immaterial artwork? Before becoming immaterial there must have been a form of interaction between the maker and the digital building-blocks of the artwork under construction, equally embodied as the experience of the viewer of the finished piece. It follows that the artwork is only immaterial between making and viewing while the processes of production and perception imply a partial materiality. Just as the act of perceiving is bound to a physical location, so the physical interaction between the artwork and its maker must have a location of some sort, somewhere within the heterotopia of intersecting virtual and physical spaces.

Invisible Work  37

Where then could the creative space of the new media artist be located? An artist of the Amsterdam KKEP collective (www.kkep.com) told me about the process of making a collaborative piece. While she was in Amsterdam and her collaborator in New York, they would work in the ‘natural’ shifts dictated by the time difference, and send their work back and forth to one another via the Internet. Not only did they get twice as much work done as they would have in the same time zone, they also profited from the creative input of the different environments they lived in. I interviewed Joanna Griffin, who works with the visualisation of satellite data, at the Utrecht ‘Impakt Festival’ 2004 (www.impakt.nl), about her ideal working space. She described it as ‘a place where I can plug in my computer and make coffee’. In both cases, the physical location of the artist overlaps with the creative space to a certain extent, yet the latter is obviously much more than somewhere to plug in the computer and make coffee. The creative space is much more difficult to mark out. Can it be found at the desk, in front of the computer, or rather at the intersection of the physical and the machine world, the ‘human computer interface’? Is it the computer itself, like the practice of case-modding suggests, creating visual spectacle by turning the outside of the computer into a personalised artefact; is it inside the computer where software programs like PhotoShop, Maya or Paint mimic the artist’s studio with its traditional tools and materials, or is it in the virtual space beyond the machine? Or is it in all these places at the same time: an oscillating creative space; an artistic new media heterotopia?

While the last option, the oscillating creative space, is the most likely answer, this space is at the same time the least tangible and concrete. More insight into the possible structure of this creative working space may be gained from the field of computer science. In order to design collaborative virtual environments, much research into the spatial experience of users who engage and work with digital technologies has been carried out. A basic outcome of this research has been to state the existence of multiple, simultaneous, hybrid spaces in which users move about. Letting go of the spatial dichotomy between (pure) physical and virtual spaces provides a parallel with the theory of the digital heterotopia as described by Poster. Computer science, however, needs to move beyond theoretical concepts in order to translate the spatial hybrids back into concrete designs. During this process, the new spatial conditions (which, as illustrated above, tend to evade exact positioning) need to be redefined outside the restrictive terminology of geographical location. In order to do so, Paul Dourish, Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine, introduced the distinction between space and place in his call for a social design for collaborative virtual environments. This concept, borrowed from the social sciences, allows for a nongeographical definition of the new spatial situation because it adds yet another layer to the hybridisation of digital and physical space: the flexible meaning of spaces in their form as place. According to Dourish ‘spaces are part of the material out of which places can be built. Dealing with physical structure, topology, orientation and connectedness, spaces offer opportunities and constraints. Places, on the other hand, reflect cultural and social understandings. Places can also have temporal properties; the same space can be different places at different times.’14

38  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

Dourish’s differentiation between space and place also helps to identify the creative working space of the artist: it is a socially- and culturally-shaped place, created from the hybrid fabric of virtual and physical spaces. On a conceptual level, this definition brings us closer to the whereabouts of the artist at work in the digital domain. But it still does not help to visualise this place. On the contrary, the oscillating, creative virtual and physical space/place seems to resist representation even more than it evades verbal description. Perhaps it is best to conclude that the creative spaces of new media artists cannot be represented, simply because there is no fixed space left to depict.

The visibility of digital tools and materials

While the creative space seems to defy representation, there are other ingredients of the art-making process which do not. These are the tools and materials of the new media artist in or at the computer. Just like the creative space, tools oscillate between a physical and virtual presence, because the keyboard, mouse, pen – or in the case of touch-screens the hand itself – are tangible devices translating movement into digital action on the screen. Most of the time, the virtual part of the tool is represented by an icon referring to a familiar device of non-digital origin, like the brush, pen, spray-can, magic wand etc.15 The physical tool can operate a variety of different, even opposing, virtual tools. For example, the mouse controls the eraser as well as the cloning device in a paint program. Yet in spite of their hybrid structure and seemingly simplified functions, the tools demand a user just as skilled and sensitive to their creative potential as do ‘traditional’ tools, as Malcolm McCollough pointed out in his important study Abstracting Craft.16 Digital

Fig. 2  François Bonvin, Attributes of Painting, late nineteenth century, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham. Reproduced with kind permission.

materials are more evasive than tools because they have no physical component but are entirely virtual. Yet even in the virtual domain, they oscillate between two shapes. On the surface, they resemble artistic material of the physical domain (images, paint, brushstrokes, colour etc.). On a different level they are software, part of software, or in their purest form, code. A simple example is the hexadecimal HTML code attached to each colour. The fact that digital tools and materials are ultimately represented in such forms could turn them into an interesting element of the (so far) hypothetical representations of the new media artist at work. However, where the brushes and palettes, chisels and rulers, marble slabs and paint tubes, paper and charcoal of predigital artists figure prominently in the (self-) portraits discussed above, there is no comparable elevation of their digital counterparts discernable yet. It is indeed hard to imagine a mouse or a brush icon as lovingly and romantically as, for example, the tools in François Bonvin’s Attributes of Painting (late nineteenth century, Barber Institute of Art, Birmingham, Fig. 2) where palette and brushes symbolise the creative process. Taking into account McCollough’s call for a digital craft, it could merely be a question of time until digital tools are used in representations to evoke the magical aura of artistic creation. So far, however, the familiar metaphors dominate.

Invisible Work  39

In this context, we may observe that digital tools and materials have not shed the iconic or symbolic bond with their precursors, as the media theorem of the ‘horseless carriage’ syndrome would have it. On the contrary, the current development of design software strives for an ever more perfect imitation of the materiality and tangibility of traditional artistic tools. The desire for a reconciliation of the senses of vision and touch, separated by the digitalisation of creative processes, is present in the amazingly precise imitation of artistic materials, from different sorts of digital canvas to virtual oil-paint that actually needs to dry, to applications simulating the direct/immediate touch of virtual objects and tools in three-dimensional environments. These developments in the design sector push towards the frontier of what David Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin have called the myth of ‘transparent immediacy’.17 In this ideal and never completely

realisable state the user could become ignorant of all traces of mediation and ‘handle’ digital material and tools directly. One might ask if the continuous effort to recreate traditional materiality in virtual environments does not restrain the development of tools and materials of an essentially digital nature, without precursors in the nondigital domain. So far, the metaphor of the painter’s, sculptor’s or architect’s tools and materials, proves to be a lot tougher than the creative space where the tools and materials are handled, which easily gave way to new forms of hybridisation. It is interesting to see how digital tools, now they have become tangible and have reappropriated, as it were, the aura of traditional creation, also become attractive for representation. I will illustrate this with two examples; one is an educational application, the other an artwork (Figs. 3 and 4).

40  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

The I/O brush is a multimedia tool for children, developed by researchers in the MIT Media Lab. It is an oversized brush with a wooden handle and bristles that incorporates a small camera. With the brush, the children are able to film a certain structure or surface and then paint with this image on a digital canvas (the application is reminiscent of the ‘image-hose’ in paint programs). The central notion is the effortless incorporation of real-world materials into digital art projects. In the articles describing the I/O brush and on the MIT website, photographs and short films show the fun and ease with which the children use the ingenious combination of digital technology and tangible tool. Watching the little artists at work, the viewer is immediately convinced of the success of the brush.18

Fig. 4  Daniel Rozin, Easel, http://smoothware.com/ danny/neweasel.html

Fig. 3  Boy working with the I/O brush, http://web.media.mit.edu/~kimiko/ iobrush/

Daniel Rozin’s art project Easel (1998) functions in a comparable way. A computer screen is set on a painter’s easel so that it appears as a traditional canvas. On the ‘canvas’ gallery visitors may combine and modify live video images and material from the Internet with a digital device mimicking a brush. Rozin describes his work as ‘a group made of two pieces that build on the concept of painting with video. The pieces in this group are truly interactive as the visitors are encouraged not only to incorporate their image into the piece but to actively paint and change the whole appearance of the piece, becoming the artists themselves’.19 It is essential to this concept that Rozin’s artwork is neither only the easel and digital canvas, nor the various works the eventual users will create. The work of art is the sum of the whole interactive process of creating images. In both cases, the focus is on art being made. Yet, the ‘showing making’ does not represent the creators of the application or artwork, it represents those who interact with the finished product. We see how intricate technologies have disappeared behind the metaphor of painting, enabling others to use them within the familiar frame of traditional artistic practice. The creative processes of those who constructed these technologies remain invisible.

The ‘making-of’ in computer graphics and animation

Invisible Work  41

So far, the search for the representation of artistic practice in the digital domain has been rather unsuccessful. Yet there is an area of digital image-making where processes of production are almost excessively represented: the field of computer graphics and computer animation. Here, ‘showing making’ has even been defined as a separate genre; the ‘making-of’. As a genre the ‘making-of’ is much older than computer graphics, but through the use of digital image manipulation in film it has gained tremendously in popularity. This is owing to the new form of image-creation. Artificially-created photorealistic images captivate viewers because they have no indexical equivalent in

42  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

the real world. Things, people, places that never existed, or do not exist anymore (e.g. dinosaurs), and events that never took place or are impossible to film in the real world may be visualised with the help of a computer.20 A way to appeal to the fascination and apprehension caused by CGI is to show how these images were generated. This can be for explanatory as well as commercial reasons. In a traditional ‘making-of’ the viewer gets a peek ‘behind the scenes‘, listens to the director’s erudite commentary, watches actors being interviewed on the set and witnesses hilarious ‘bloopers’. The iconography of the ‘making-of’ computer-animated scenes looks rather different. It is much more static. Most of the time we see animators or technicians sitting in front of computers, displaying skilful manipulation of tools and immaterial materials while the images they create come into being on a screen. Glancing over the shoulder of computer wizards, we might witness the different stages of a spectacular stunt, like the ‘bullet time’ effect in the Matrix trilogy (Wachowsky Brothers 1999–2002) or the building of an underwater anemone in Finding Nemo (Stanton and Unkrich 2003), on its way to photorealism, from wire-frame animation to a fully-coloured and shaded sequence. The formal set up of these ‘making-ofs’ bears a close resemblance to the iconography of the atelier scenes discussed above. (Fig. 5) The genre also answers to the same visual paradox. Practice is displayed without giving away the secret of the actual ‘how to’. Showing the computer animator at the screen does not deconstruct visual illusion. If this were the case, we would probably not enjoy watching ‘making-ofs’. Yet, regardless of their promise to reveal the ‘making- of’ illusion, the genre does not destroy but rather enhances the pleasure of looking.21 Part of this pleasure is achieved because we learn about the amount of work and skill invested in the creation of illusionist imagery. This knowledge causes the viewer to admire the dexterity and competence of the maker(s), and the stimulation of awe is also of economic value.

Fig. 5  Computer artist at work, and Anguissola’s Self-portrait (see Fig. 1).

Commercially speaking, the ‘making-of’ is a way to display the power to shape technology (‘only we can create these images’). Although a fixed mode to represent practice does exist, new media artists generally do not use the ‘making-of’ to reflect on their practice. This might be owing to a number of reasons, such as the commercial aspect and the predetermined appearance of the genre. But predominantly, an artist might not employ the visual strategies of the ‘making-of’ because it is so closely tied to the creation of photorealist or at least representational imagery. This is also the reason why the ‘making-of’ can seamlessly tie back to the visual vocabulary of the painter in front of the easel. Mimicking reality and creating visual illusion profits by showing or showing off practice, be it in the sixteenth or in the twentieth century. Yet today’s new media creative practices encompass infinitely more strategies than the representation of realistic computer-generated-imagery. Artists who operate within this set of paradigms seem to prefer not to represent themselves (at work) at all.

The artist at work

To summarise, the process of artistic practice seems to be rendered invisible by a variety of factors: the metaphor of the laboratory; the difficulties in describing and visualising the procedures of data programming; the hybridisation of creative space; and the multiplicity of artistic practice within this space. Practice itself does become visible, but only in certain instances, dissociated from the artist. It appears in the digital tools mimicking analogue predecessors, in digital materials like software and data, or in interactive artworks engaging the viewer/user. However, the embodied representation of the artist at work only resurfaces when creative practice remediates traditional modes of art-making, like the affirmative creation of realities in computer graphics and animation. Two conclusions are possible. Either the representation of artists at work has become obsolete in new media art practice and the mystification of artistic creation has finally been discarded, or the representation of practice has become just as hybridised as the space in which it takes place. Most likely, creative practice in the digital domain is still in search of representation, and as it is a self-reflective genre, it might take some time to develop modes to resolve this issue.

Invisible Work  43

An example of how practice might present itself is the ‘Life-Sharing’ project of the Net artist collective 0100101110101101.org. It ran from 2000–2003 and enabled users to directly access the artists’ computers. Based on the assumption that people are their computers 01.org not only wanted to lay bare their own artistic practice but also their everyday life practice by allowing users to witness, copy, interfere, and ultimately become their practice. In an interview with Matthew Fuller, the group stated that Life-Sharing was not concerned with representation. Yet on their website the project is described as ‘a real-time digital self-portrait’. In addition, the title of the interview ‘Data Nudism’ and other articles titled ‘Portrait of the Artist as Hard Disk’ or ‘The Self on the Screen’ clearly allude to representations of the making and maker of artworks.22 The exact shape of these representations, however, is difficult to grasp. In ‘Life-Sharing’ the artists become perceptible in the form of data, when the user/viewer chooses to

interact with these data. Rather than leaving representation behind altogether, it seems that showing the act of making art has been shifted toward the domain of the user. Because it depends on the process of sharing, the artwork needs the user to come into being. As a result, it has simultaneously become the site of its own ‘showing making’, leaving the physical presence of the artist behind.

Notes   1. The work is discussed in Bolter, D.J. and Gromala, D., (2003), Windows and Mirrors. Interaction Design, Digital Art, and the Myth of Transparency, Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press.

  2. The Tate Modern for instance has collected many interviews with artists, see www.tate.org. uk (active 28 May 2008).

  3. See for example: Cole, M. and Pardo, M. eds. (2005), Inventions of the Studio. Renaissance to Romanticism, Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press; Haveman, M. et al. (eds.) (2006), Ateliergeheimen. Over de werkplaats van de kunstenaar vanaf 1200 tot heden, Amsterdam/Zutphen: Kunst and Schrijven.   4. See the Francis Bacon Studio webpages at www.hughlane.ie/fb_studio/ (active 28 May 2008).   5. Latour, B. (1987), Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

  6. Stallabrass, J. (2003), Internet Art; The Online Clash of Culture and Commerce, London: Tate Publishing; Greene, R. (2004), Internet Art, London: Thames and Hudson; Paul, C. (2003), Digital Art, London: Thames and Hudson; Wilson, S. (2002), Information Arts: A Survey of Art and Research at the Intersection of Art, Science and Technology, Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press.   7. Stallabrass, J. (2003), Internet Art, p. 27, 29, 34.

44  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

  8. Stallabrass, J. (2003), Internet Art, p. 38. An exception is Olia Lialina’s article ‘A Vernacular Web. The Indigenous and The Barbarians’, http://art.teleportacia.org/observation/vernacular (active 28 May 2008).

  9. For a recent discussion of the open source ideal see Boomen, M. van den, Schäfer, M. T. (2005) ‘Will the Revolution be Open-Sourced? How Open Source Travels Through Society’, How open is the Future? Economic, Social and Cultural Scenarios inspired by Free and Open Source Software, Wynants, M., Cornelis, J. (eds.), Brussels. (also at http://crosstalks.vub.ac.be/publications/ howopenisthefuture/crosstalks_book1.pdf, active 28 May 2008). 10. For a discussion of the spatial turn in cultural studies see Massey, D. (2005), For Space, London, SAGE; Couldry, N., McCarthy, A. (eds.) (2004), Mediaspace. Place, Scale and Culture in a Media Age, London: Routledge.

11. Foucault, M., Miskowiec, J. (1986), ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics, 16: 1, pp. 22–27 (also at http:// foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html, active 28 May 2008). Hayles, N. K. (2002), ‘Flesh and Metal: Reconfiguring the Mindbody in Virtual Environments’, Configurations, 10: 2, pp. 297–320, Poster, M. (2004), ‘Digitally Local Communications: Technologies and Space’, conference paper, The Global and the Local in Mobile Communication: Places, Images, People, Connections, Budapest (See the poster at http://www.locative.net/ tcmreader/index.php?cspaces, active 20 April 2006). 12. Legrady, G. (1999), ‘Intersecting the Virtual and the Real: Space in Interactive Media Installations’, Wide Angle 21/1: pp. 104–113, here p. 105, reprinted in Rieser, M., Zapp, A., (eds.) (2005), New Screen Media. Cinema/Art/Narrative, London, pp. 221–226.

13. Legrady, G. (1999), ‘Intersecting the Virtual and the Real: Space in Interactive Media Installations’, Wide Angle 21/1: pp. 104–113, here p. 105, reprinted in Rieser, M., Zapp, A., (eds.) (2005), New Screen Media. Cinema/Art/Narrative, London, p. 106.

14. Harrison, S., Dourish, P. (2001), ‘Re-Place-ing Space. The Role of Space and Place in Collaborative Systems’, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Proceedings of the 1996 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, Boston, Massachusetts, United States, pp. 67–76, here p. 73. See also Dourish, P., Where the Action is. The Foundation of Embodied Interaction, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

15. For the development of tool metaphors and early paint programs, see Smith, A.R. (2001), ‘Digital Paint Systems: An Anecdotal and Historical Overview’, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 23: 2, pp. 4–30.

16. McCullough, M. (1996), Abstracting Craft. The Practised Digital Hand, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 17. Bolter, D., Grusin, R. (1999), Remediation. Understanding New Media, Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press. 18. Ryoaki, K., Marti, S., Ishii, H. (2004), ‘I/O Brush: Drawing with Everyday Objects as Ink’(Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems), Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, Vienna, Austria, pp. 303–310 and http:// web.media.mit.edu/~kimiko/iobrush/, active 28 May 2008). 19. See http://smoothware.com/danny/neweasel.html (active 28 May 2008).

20. Much has been written on the impact of computer-generated imagery (CGI) on the perception of reality, and the fascination as well as anxieties caused by it. See for example Mitchell, W.J. (1992), The Reconfigured Eye. Visual Truth in the Post-photographic Era, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press; Savedoff, B. (1997), ‘Escaping Reality: Digital Imagery and the Resources of Photography’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55:2, pp. 202–214; Manovich, L. (2001), The Language of New Media, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. On computer graphics’ hunt for photorealism see Jones, B. (1989), ‘Computer Imagery: Imitation and Representation of Realities’, Leonardo: Journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology, Computer Art in Context Supplemental Issue, pp. 31–38; Moskovich, J. (2002), ‘To Infinity and Beyond: Assessing the Technological Imperative in Computer Animation’, Screen, 43:3, pp. 293–314. 21. On the ‘making-of’ as genre see Hight, C. (2005), ‘Making-of documentaries on DVD: The Lord of the Rings trilogy and special editions’, The Velvet Light Trap, 56 (3), pp. 5–17; and Hediger, V. (2005) ‘Spaß an harter Arbeit. Der Making of-Film’, Demnächst in ihrem Kino. Grundlagen der Filmwerbung und Filmvermarktung, P. Vonderau (ed.), Marburg, Schüren, pp. 332–341. 22. Fuller, M., ‘Data Nudism’, An Interview with 0100101110101101.org about life-sharing, www. walkerart.org/gallery9/lifesharing/; Baumgärtel, T., ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Hard Disk’, Eyestorm and ibid., ‘The Self on the Screen’, Selfware www.eyestorm.com/feature/ED2n_ article.asp?article_id=300&caller=1, all three also at www.0100101110101101.org/home/ life_sharing/media.html (active 28 May 2008).

Invisible Work  45

Digital Spaces

Mapping Outside the Frame: Interactive and Locative Art Environments Elizabeth Coulter-Smith and Graham Coulter-Smith

Interactivity and ‘locativity’ have become the buzz words of new media art. In spite of interactivity being possibly the most salient and significant feature of new media art it is not widely understood or thoroughly theorised. This paper will seek to explore the fundamentals of interactivity and in the course of this investigation we will examine the significance of locative media, the most recent form of new media art. One of the enduring goals of avant-garde art from Dada onward has been to deconstruct the barrier between the viewer and the work of art.1 Attempts to achieve this by undermining the elitism of the traditional notion of the aesthetic object have been persistently defeated by the fine art system wherein even a public convenience urinal such as Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, 1917, is transmuted into a precious objet d’art. Fountain recently sold at auction for over a million dollars.2 The transformation of virtually any form of artistic production into extremely precious objects means that visiting an art gallery/museum is akin to visiting a bank vault. The visitor is constantly watched by guards and CCTV and segregated from the precious objects by a variety of barriers. During the 1960s a great deal was made of the ‘phenomenological’ involvement of the viewer with minimalist sculpture. In reality this involvement was not dramatic and reached its high point when one was allowed to walk on Carl Andre’s metal tile sculptures. It is rare to be offered the opportunity of doing that today. Art at the turn of the millennium has been marked by a burgeoning installation art movement which is the latest attempt to involve the viewer in the work of art. Most texts on installation art put forward the thesis that installation offers a greater degree of viewer participation. Accordingly Claire Bishop suggests that installation art is ‘the type of art into which the viewer physically enters and which is often described as “theatrical”, “immersive” or “experiential”’.3 In reality the majority of installations are not that different from traditional sculpture. One can cite, for instance, Jason Rhoades and Paul McCarthy’s ‘transgressive’ Sheep Plug (2004), installation at the ‘Dionysiac’ exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2005 in which a great deal of junk material was spread out across a gallery floor.4 As both artists now possess superstar status their ‘transgressive’ ‘anti-art’ stuff has been transmuted by the fine art system into precious objects. Accordingly, visitors had to be channelled by a path through the detritus delineated by tape stuck onto the gallery floor. This created an experience not unlike that of looking at a sculpture on a pedestal. And this lack of immersion and segregation of the viewer from installation art is not uncommon.

Indeed one can criticise contemporary installation sculpture on the basis that it aspires to a more intimate viewer experience yet at the same time is more intimately allied to the fabric of the gallery apparatus than has ever been the case before. Artists of the 1960s attacked the institution of art as did the Dadaists, but at the turn of the millennium there has arisen a new complicity between the so-called avant-garde artist of today and the capitalist art system that has the power to transmute virtually anything into an extremely precious object.5 The technical means of creating viewer participation in new media art can be as simple as a mouse or touchpad. In more elaborate gallery installations more sophisticated sensors can be used such as web cams and floor pads. Such sensors detect the movement of people in the viewing zone of the work of art and use this data to either cause alterations in the artwork being displayed or, alternatively, to generate a visualisation of this movement. Locative art is an extension of such interactivity that uses devices such as GPS tracking to create a much larger zone of data collection. It is also generally the case that locative art often uses the data collected to create the visualisation rather than simply altering an already-existing data-driven work of art.

50  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

Interactivity

By examining the spheres of new media art and fine art it is possible to suggest three dimensions of interactivity which can intermingle and intersect. First, there is the game which is currently drawing a great deal of attention in the field of new media, due in part to the extreme popularity of computer games. There is no doubt that the game creates a high degree of interactivity, but making this aesthetically sophisticated is not so easy. We will argue that whereas traditional fine art has almost exclusively avoided this zone of inquiry new media art has been successful in creating game-like interactivity that is elegant and sophisticated. Second, there is physical interactivity which can be as simple as using a mouse to interact with online art, or which can become phenomenologically embodied when more sophisticated sensors are deployed in a gallery environment. The third mode of interactivity involves the engagement of visual perception; this is the dimension in which fine art excels. We will argue that this mode of interaction is defined by its disembodiment, whereas the capacity of new media art to introduce physiologically-oriented input devices enables it to go beyond the disembodied gaze into the dimension of embodied interactivity.

Fig. 1  Frisbee House by Carsten Höller (above) and Gabriel Orozco’s Ping Pond Table (right), Common Wealth, Tate Modern, 2003.

Fig. 2  Gabriel Orozco, My Hands Are My Heart, 1991 (right). Yielding Stone, 1992 (below)

Deconstructive play is currently a major theme in contemporary fine art, but in general fine artists play with themselves. Creating game-like or playful interactivity is woefully underdeveloped in the sphere of fine art. Generally speaking despite rhetoric regarding ‘art into life’, ‘social sculpture’ or ‘relational aesthetics’,6 fine art remains devoted to the tradition of the ‘great artist’ and the role of the viewer remains that of admiring the heightened sensibility and ingenuity of such artists.

Fine art is much more successful when it comes to involving the spectator’s visual perception: the level of the disembodied gaze. For example Carsten Höller created an interactive installation in which the participants wore special spectacles that turned the world upside down. In another installation he used a wall-sized field of light bulbs

Mapping Outside the Frame  51

When attempts are made by fine artists to involve the viewer they can appear derisory. One instance is the ‘Common Wealth’ exhibition at Tate Modern, 2003, in which two works by Carsten Höller and Gabriel Orozco made attempts at interactivity. Höller’s work, Frisbee House, consisted of an igloo-like tent with holes cut into its fabric. The viewer was invited to throw Frisbees through the holes. Orozco’s contribution was a four-sided table-tennis game with a water lily pond in the middle. Will the balls land on the water or on a water lily? The only remarkable feature of either of these works was that the viewer was released from the usual lap-dancer ‘you can look but don’t touch’ regime of the art museum. What was missing was any degree of ingenuity. It was as if these two celebrated artists were unable to open up the viewer’s creative process beyond the level of a three-year old. This is especially strange because Orozco has played many simple yet interesting formal games by himself such as making a clay heart out of his hands or creating a sculptural object by rolling a ball of clay over a grid.

Fig. 3  Carsten Höller Inverted world, 2001.

flashing on and off at alpha brain-wave frequency to induce a feeling of well-being in the viewer. One can also cite the dislocations of the gaze evident in Ann Veronica Janssens’s mist installations and Olafur Eliassons’s colour rooms in which the viewer steps into a circular room fitted with sophisticated lighting that alters almost imperceptibly. The effect of Höller’s, Janssens’s and Eliassons’s phenomenological installations is to create a heightened awareness of perceptual processes by immersive experiences that dislocate habitual ways of seeing. The heightening of perception in the work of Höller, Janssens and Elissons indicates a high point for interactivity in the domain of fine art, but one can observe that in each and every case the focus is on the disembodied gaze. There is little haptic involvement nor is there any sense of letting the viewer enter into the sphere of play that appears reserved for the privileged fine artist.

52  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

Game-like interactivity in new media art

It is not difficult to find instances of new media art that combine game-like interactivity with a significant degree of aesthetic elegance. We will examine just three artists: Luc Courchesne, Bill Seaman and Nancy Burson. Luc Courchesne’s Portrait One, 1990, is simple and elegant. It consists of a computer screen with a mouse. The screen shows what appears to be a static portrait of a woman. However, when the viewer activates the mouse a menu appears below the image enabling the viewer to ‘speak’ to the woman on the screen via a series of multiple choice questions. One selects a question and the woman, now animated, answers. Remarkably, this simple interactive game creates the illusion of having a conversation with what was at first a static image. One realises that it is a game, but at the same time what appeared at first sight to be a disembodied face gains human characteristics through which the viewer experiences a surprising degree of empathy. One can compare this work with experiments in artificial intelligence such as ‘Alice’ (www.alicebot.org) and the more sophisticated ‘Laura’.7

Fig. 4  Luc Courchesne, Portrait One, 1990. The text reads ‘what are you doing here’, ‘who are you’, and ‘do I stand a chance?’

Nancy Burson also explores game-like interactive art. Her Human Race Machine allows the viewer to see how they would look if they were a different race (black, white, Asian, Hispanic, Indian). The viewer first coordinates their face with an edge detection map and then presses the button to see their face morphed into another race. Again this is a simple game but creates a high degree of fascination as the viewer is able to explore his or her identity beyond their current self-image. Human Race Machine also has a political agenda communicating the message that race is not an indicator of significant genetic distinctions between peoples. Like Courchesne’s Portrait One, the viewer’s experience of the Human Race Machine is very individual and quite different from the experience of old media fine art wherein the viewer explores not their own individuality, but that of another person: the privileged artist-creator. Bill Seaman has been experimenting with interactive games for some time beginning with interactive ‘recombinant poetry’. In The Exquisite Mechanism of Shivers, 1992, it was possible to use a mouse to construct an interactive poem by choosing a word from a list.

Mapping Outside the Frame  53

Fig. 5  Bill Seaman, From: The Exquisite Mechanism of Shivers, 1992.

Fig. 6  Jeffrey Shaw, Legible City, 1989 (left), Place: Ruhr, 2000 (right).

54  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

The choice then appeared on the screen in the context of a short poetic phrase which was generated by the computer on the basis of a simple algorithm. In a more recent work, The Hybrid Invention Generator, Seaman applies similar principles to imagery. Seaman’s work is significant because it brings a genuinely interactive dimension to Surrealist-like automatism. The game of the Exquisite Corpse, for example, was a variation on a parlour game played by the Surrealists and consisted of folding up a piece of paper and drawing on it, folding it to reveal a new blank section and passing it on to the next player, and so on. This game was related to the aesthetics of chance and it is possible to argue that the strategy of chance that binds Marcel Duchamp, Dada and Surrealism opens up possibilities in the sphere of the interactive game. This is evident when Peter Bürger describes cut-and-paste poetry and automatic writing as having ‘the character of recipes’: Given the avant-gardist intention to do away with art as a sphere that is separate from life-praxis [Lebenspraxis] it is logical to eliminate the antithesis between producer and recipient. It is no accident that both Tzara’s instructions for the making of a Dadaist poem and Breton’s for the writing of automatic texts have the character of recipes. This represents not only a polemical attack on the individual creativity of the artist; the recipe is to be taken quite literally as suggesting a possible activity on the part of the recipient.8

The same can be said of Fluxus performances and Happenings of the 1960s which were informed by the concept that given a putative deconstruction of the work of art as precious object ‘anyone could be an artist’. That concept never really caught on in the art market, but the theoretical framework still remains and the evidence is that the immateriality of new media art is creating a zone in which, to paraphrase Bürger, ‘the recipient can become part of the creative activity’.

Physical and embodied interactivity in new media art

The degree of physical (tactile, kinesthetic) participation in an interactive work of new media art is proportional to the degree of influence the viewer-participant can have on the work of art and to the degree of awareness the viewer can have of his or her participation. Moving one’s finger on a touchpad to interact with online art is generally a fairly limited degree of interactivity. Interacting in a gallery space via web cam

Fig. 7  Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Trace, Fundacion Telefonica, 1995, 2000.

sensors and positional analysis creates a much more powerful physical effect. One of the most successful seminal instances of gallery-based interactive art is Jeffrey Shaw’s now classic new media art work Legible City, 1989 (with Dirk Groeneveld). In this work one rides a fixed bicycle the speed and direction of which affects where one travels in a computer- generated city (constructed out of three-dimensional letters) projected on a large screen ahead of the rider. The principal effect of this work was one of being embodied in the ‘legible city’. One has a palpable sense of physical relationship with the image on the screen to a degree that is rare when viewing traditional fine art media. Riding a bicycle in a virtual city may not appear to be particularly profound, but it is considerably more engrossing than walking on Carl Andre’s metal tiles. One could accuse Legible City of being a primitive instance of interactivity but that accusation merely points to the even more primitive nature of the dissolution of the boundary between viewer and art object evident in most instances of sculptural installation art at the turn of the millennium. And as was argued above, even in those instances where installation art achieves a significant degree of interactivity it is, for the most part, a heightening of the disembodied gaze. Embodied interactivity appears to be the preserve of new media.

Place: Ruhr consists of a rotating platform in the middle of a 360° panoramic screen. A 120° image is projected onto the screen by three projectors. The image is of the landscape of the Ruhr, once the industrial heartland of Germany and now undergoing post-industrial degeneration. By manipulating a joystick the viewer can move the

Mapping Outside the Frame  55

Mark B. N. Hansen goes so far as to argue that new media art is defined by its capacity for interactive embodiment which he suggests is an evolution beyond the traditional concept of the disembodied image, whether that be painterly, photographic or cinematic.9 Although he does not use this analogy, Hansen’s point appears to be that new media interactivity allows the viewer to enter into the image in a manner akin to the scene in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) in which Max Renn (James Woods) puts his head and body into a television screen thereby entering into the televisual domain. And to make his point Hansen refers to a recent interactive installation by Jeffrey Shaw, Place: Ruhr, 2000.

120° image across the larger 360° surface. If viewers see something that interests them, they can zoom into the image. Hansen reports that because the scenes are formally ‘homeothetic’ (‘isomorphic’ might be a more accessible term) with the curved panoramic space of the viewer ‘movement from physical to virtual image space is accompanied by a feeling of continuity that partially obscures the difference between physical and virtual space’.10 Hansen quotes ZKM (Centre for Art and Media Technology) director Peter Weibel’s observations on Shaw’s recent work as ‘a heightened ability to view and use the world according to one’s own notions, more individually, more subjectively’.11 And Hansen suggests that the physical involvement of the viewer in the viewing process makes ‘technology a supplement to the body’.12 In short, Place: Ruhr enhances the experience of embodiment experienced in Shaw’s earlier work Legible City. Another work that explores embodied interactivity is Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Trace: Telepresencing Across the World, 1995. It is an interactive-locative work that is impressive even ten years after its initial construction, because it can interconnect the physical presences of two people who can be a world apart. And the interpersonal, or ‘relational’ nature of Trace underscores the connection between embodiment and empathy.13

56  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

Trace consists of two rooms and two participants. These rooms could be on opposite ends of the globe. Each room is designed to record the movements of the local participant and to simultaneously display the movement of the remote participant. One enters a darkened room equipped with a location tracking device which will transmit to the remote room via a telephone line in real time. The movements of the remote participant are visualised to the local participant in various ways. First, there are white and blue robotic spotlights. The blue spotlight projects the position of the local participant onto the floor and the white shows the location of the remote person. Fog is introduced into the room to enhance the effect of the moving light beams. Second, speakers surrounding the room give the local participant positional sound feedback regarding the location of the remote participant. If the remote moves to the right the sound moves to the right. If the remote person moves closer to the local person the sound gets louder. Thirdly, there are two data screens on the wall of the room that show the relative positions of the participants via dots and graphs. Finally, the entire ceiling is a screen showing an abstracted, three-dimensional, computer-generated visualisation of the relative positions of the participants. The local is represented by a disk and the remote by a circle; when the two reach the same coordinates the circles encompasses the disk. Lozano-Hemmer uses the term ‘telembodiment’ to describe the point at which the remote and local participants might share the same coordinates. And the entire installation is designed to explore a new dimension of telecommunication that extends beyond sound and vision to the sense of bodily presence. It is obvious that Lozano-Hemmer wants the multiple feedbacks to transcend their abstraction and result in a sense of shared physical presence.14

Interactivity in an expanded field: locative art

Trace indicates that it is possible to expand the field of interactivity over vast distances. With this in mind we would like to shift our attention to one of the most recent developments in interactive new media art: locative art. The term ‘locative art’ is a

Fig. 8  Charles Lim Yi Yong and Woo Tien Wei, Tsunamii. net, installation at Documenta 11, 2002.

relatively new addition to new media art and its relationship to interactivity deserves some consideration. ‘Locativity’ is not so much a revolutionary departure as an extension of the systems we have already examined. One could for example refer to sensors that map the movements of people in a gallery space as ‘locative’. The main difference appears to be that locative art uses input devices that can function over a much larger area than is evident in the work we have examined so far. These devices include the cellular phone system and wi-fi, but the most significant is the Global Positioning System (GPS) which is a truly global and pervasive sensor system.

Another interesting feature of locative art is that it often uses the interactive data collected to create the visualisation rather than simply altering an already existing datadriven work of art. Yet this can cause problems because it is not necessarily the case that a raw representation of data will produce an aesthetically appealing visualisation. A case in point is a seminal instance of locative new media art by the Singaporian artists Tsunamii.net, Charles Lim Yi Yong and Woo Tien Wei, exhibited at ‘Documenta 11’, Kassel, 2002.

Mapping Outside the Frame  57

GPS was developed as a military navigation system and remains controlled by the US Air Force. It consists of a constellation of 24 satellites constantly monitored by military base-stations. This system provides the military and civilians with accurate information about their position, speed and time anywhere in the world, whatever the weather conditions. Position can be calculated to the metre (and closer for the US military). Although locative art uses other pervasive systems such as the cellular phone networks and wi-fi none are as globally pervasive as GPS. And it is the concept of an invisible grid mapping the entire globe that seems fascinating to artists.

Fig. 9  Hamish Fulton, Alps Horizon, 1989; Montes de Toledo, 1990. Wall painting 218 x 1770 cm.

58  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

In an interview Woo Tien Wei explained that the idea was for Charles Lim Yi Yong to walk from Kassel to Kiel where the Documenta website server resides: a 400–500km journey. Lim Yi Yong carried a computer with cellular internet and GPS equipment in his backpack. This equipment allowed his movement to be tracked. The cellular internet connection for his computer allowed his movements to be tracked via the changing IP numbers allotted to his computer by the different cellular providers he passed through. The installation in Documenta 11, Kassel consists of several screens placed on the gallery floor. One screen indicates the current IP number of the traveller, another shows his current position on a large-scale map and another on a smaller-scale map. The idea is interesting, but unfortunately the visualisation aspect of this particular work was completely lost in the welter of visuality of a major art exhibition. The lack of aesthetic dimension in the Tsunamii.net installation exhibited at Documenta 11 possibly stems from being overwhelmed by the technology to the detriment of a focus on visualisation. Visualisation need not be especially complex. Land artist Hamish Fulton’s extremely simple but aesthetically effective wall painting in which he depicts his journey from the north to the south coast of Spain, in 1990, with a simple white line painted on a black background, is a good example. The aesthetic impact comes from its elegant simplicity plus the fact that the painting fills an entire wall of the gallery. Douglas Huebler’s 42° Parallel Piece, 1968, is another instance of a simple mode of visualisation that is relevant to a consideration of contemporary locative art. Huebler’s text describes the project as involving ‘14 locations (A through N) [which] are towns exactly or approximately on the 42° parallel in the United States. Locations were marked by the exchange of certified postal receipts sent from and returned to site “A” in Truro, Massachusetts’. Huebler’s fundamental idea appears to be that of transposing the abstract artistic/mathematical concept of a line into geographical terms. His delineation of a line across the middle of the United States integrates with the imaginary lines of latitude and longitude that we have projected onto our planet: lines that exist in an extraordinary space in-between the imaginary and the pragmatic. Huebler’s work is significant to this discussion because it is not simply a representation, it is also interactive, in the sense of interacting with systems of information in the everyday world; in this case the postal system. It is also a visualisation because it produces a

Fig. 10  Douglas Huebler, 42° Parallel Piece, 1968.

meaningful articulation of its interaction via its reference to the abstract lines of latitude that are so important to global commerce and defence. Huebler’s work is also especially relevant to GPS art which is an extension of the immaterial yet highly practical system of longitude and latitude.

GPS data visualisation

Software has been developed that outputs the data from a GPS receiver and translates it into a line that effectively produces a ‘drawing’ of the journey taken by the person carrying the receiver. To make a GPS drawing one needs to connect the GPS receiver to a computer using software that can read the data. The GPS receiver sends data in a string or sentence that might look something like this:

Mapping Outside the Frame  59

Huebler’s use of the US postal system was ingenious but GPS provides a much greater wealth of data due to the fact that it covers the entire surface of the earth. Charles Lim Yi Yong of Tsunamii.net had to carry his GPS equipment in a backpack, but today we can purchase small hand-held GPS receivers that give us precise data regarding our location virtually wherever we might be. One can use GPS for an entirely different purpose than that for which it was originally intended, in the same way that Huebler used the technology of the US Postal Service. Unfortunately Tsunamii.net’s Documenta 11 exhibit was not particularly impressive but fortunately more recent experiments with GPS art have discovered the beauty of the simplicity of the line evident in the work of both Huebler and Fulton; and one can also mention Richard Long, the British land artist, who has photographed many lines he has made during walks in various parts of the world.

First, there is a National Marine Electronics Association (NMEA) code ‘$GPGLL’, then the Latitude, North or South, Longitude, East or West, Time (hhmmss), Data Valid ‘A’, Carriage Return and Line Feed. Below is an illustration showing the kind of drawing that GPS data can lead to. The GPS drawings shown below were made during a project carried out by Jeremy Wood that made use of Charles Jencks’ landscape architecture Landform Ueda outside Scotland’s National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. Landform Ueda provides a data collection zone with an area of 3,000 square metres. The aim of the work is to sense human presence within a delineated public space and use the data collected from the sensors to visualise both individual and collective presence via a representational system that could take different forms such as a printout, projection or an LCD display. In the Landform Ueda work participants are provided with GPS receivers prior to going for a walk. The results from the data collected are both aesthetic and informative (in the sense of mapping differences in individual journeys). One can also point to the fact that the hand-held GPS receiver enables a group interactivity thereby amplifying the displacement of attention away from the privileged individual artist-creator that is an inherent characteristic of all interactive art.

60  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

During the course of his experiments with GPS visualisation Wood has experimented with GPS sculptures and three-dimensional animated GPS drawings. This variety of possible outputs is a significant feature of data art as it points to the fact that the dataset is separate from the mode of its visualisation. In contrast, conventional modes of representation begin and end with a specific visualisation. A dataset, however, can be represented in a wide variety of ways. Indeed the separation of the dataset from its mode of representation is similar to the way in which an SQL or XML database functions. In such databases the dataset is broken down into its simplest components which are labelled and stored. These simple components can be displayed and interrelated in many different ways. Another of Wood’s projects is the production of flight maps. Wood asks the question: What would a model of the globe look like if all my journeys were mapped? It is an

Fig. 11  Jeremy Wood’s mapping of Landform Ueda designed by Charles Jencks outside Scotland’s National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh.

Fig. 12  Jeremy Wood, transposition of GPS data into sculptural configurations (left). Jeremy Wood, Flight Map, 2004 (right).

interesting proposition which reminds one of the section above on interactive games. One is reminded in particular of Nancy Burson’s Human Race Machine which provides individuals with new perspectives on themselves. Wood’s flight maps also achieve a similar effect, although the project is currently in a rudimentary aesthetic condition and looks suspiciously like the illustrations in airline magazines. Wood’s flight maps keep the visual representation simple which cannot be said for his more whimsical GPS drawings such as a frolicking cat GPS drawing made in Edmunds Park, Didcot, Oxfordshire. The bathos of Wood’s Didcot Cat is even more disappointing than Tsunamii.net’s Documenta 11 contribution. It is, however, a useful contrast to the other pieces by Wood that we have shown. From an aesthetic point of view the more abstract GPS visualisations are preferable to the attempts at representational drawing. The latter appear to stem from a conventional and literalistic interpretation of the concept of ‘drawing’ that reveals a worrying lack of aesthetic sophistication. More to the point, the primary purpose of the kinds of visualisation offered by GPS drawing should reflect the kinds of exploration evident in the other modes of interactive art we have explored in this essay; which is to say we should not be dealing with conventional representation but with new ways of seeing.

Fig. 13  Jeremy Wood, The Didcot Cat, GPS drawing made in Edmunds Park, Didcot, Oxfordshire.

Mapping Outside the Frame  61

Interactive and locative art offer at the turn of the millennium another way of seeing. If it is to be explored seriously, it should have resonance with the extraordinary expansion in ways of seeing that occurred at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when photography, film, chronophotography, x-rays and theories concerning the possibility of a fourth-dimension of space had significant impact on early modernist art.15 One can

62  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

Fig. 14  Etienne-Jules Marey, Chronophotographic analysis of a person walking (left). Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase no. 2, 1912 (right).

Fig. 15  Etienne-Jules Marey, Figure with physiologically mapped clothing stepping off a stool (left). The flight of a seagull, 1886 (right).

remember, for example, that the Constructivist artist László Moholy-Nagy entitled his 1929 book The New Vision, and argued that an artist who could not use a camera was visually illiterate. Wood’s Didcot Cat becomes questionable when contrasted with the power of Etienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge’s chronophotography which pioneered what we would refer to today as ‘motion capture’. The fact that Marey and Muybridge’s work was produced over a century ago serves to underscore the lessons that practitioners of GPS drawing still need to learn. Marey’s work, in particular, is of interest because he pioneered the physiological marking of limbs and joints that is still used today in motion capture devices. His development of a system that could capture the body moving in space-time enabled a new conception of the human body as a highly coordinated and complex field of forces. His abstracted visualisation of the human body in motion inspired Giacomo Balla to embark upon a series of Mareyesque abstract visualisations of ‘speeding automobiles’. Marcel Duchamp was inspired by Marey to create his Cubo-Futurist masterwork Nude Descending a Staircase, 1913. Marey was first and foremost a scientist but we can see his photographs as possessing not only significant data but also a strangeness that lends them aesthetic qualities. Marey’s abstractionistic analysis of animals and the human figure in motion was a precursor for the deconstruction of classical, Euclidean, space and time evident in Analytical Cubism. The modernist ‘new vision’ was inspired by science, but today most fine artists know little, if anything, about science: which provides new media artists with yet another possible sphere of contribution. With regard to Marey’s remarkable visualisations one can note that his ability to capture what Gilles Deleuze would refer to as the ‘movement-image’ provided us with a paradigm that has yet to be explored in full.16 Technologies such as GPS and indeed other varieties of sensors that are able to track in space and time could well benefit from returning to the work of Marey whose vision is not so much cinematic as it is an exploration of the dynamic formalisms that exist in between static frames.

Conclusion

The turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was a period of revolution in art. Fine art at the turn of the millennium reveals a situation in which ‘transgression’ has become ‘play’, which is to say games that artists play with themselves and which place the viewer in the role of ardent admirer. Similarly, the early twentieth century avantgarde desire to bring art into everyday life has failed to materialise. Instead we see the artistic ‘transgression’ of Dada and radical art of the 1960s devolved into a playful complicity with the art system. One can cite, for example, the fashion for grunge installation sculpture by Jason Rhoades, Thomas Hirschhorn, Tracey Emin and John

Mapping Outside the Frame  63

New media remains a seminal field akin to the very early days of photography and film. This makes it a virtually virgin territory attractive to both artists and theorists. The concepts of interactivity as embodied gaze, games and movement-image that have been explored in this text are significant because they point to the limitations of old fine art media while simultaneously inviting a new generation of artists to explore the new frontiers offered by new media.

Bock, to name but a few. Such installations are far from transgressive due to the fact that they are transmuted into precious objects by the art system. Reiterations of the art into life dictum evident in Nicolas Bourriaud’s ‘relational aesthetics’ seem overblown when most fine art celebrates not only the transmutation of junk into gold but also the privileged status of the individual artist-creator.17 Against this background new media art seems to be the only sphere of artistic activity in which there is any hope of realising the goal of overcoming the elitism of fine art. The foundation of this hope lies in the inherent interactivity of new media art and its replacement of the disembodied gaze of traditional fine art with an embodied gaze and a displacement of the privileged individualism of the artist-creator by an expansion of the space of participation. One can also point to the concept of artistic interactive games that seem to be an especially fertile territory for aesthetic exploration. We are still only in the first years of the new millennium, and should remember that the artistic revolution in the early twentieth century took some years to arrive. Hopefully new media art will be able to realise the goal of social relevance that contemporary fine art has largely abandoned.

Notes   1. Bürger, P. (1984), Theory of the Avant-Garde. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 53.

  2. Duchamp’s famous ready-made urinal sold at auction for over a million dollars. Sale details are available from www.artprice.com (subscription required, accessed 29 September 2007).   3.  Bishop, C. (2005), Installation Art: a Critical History. London: Tate, p. 6.

  4. Macel, C. (ed.) (2005), Dionysiac – Paris Centre Pompidou. Gelatin, John Bock, Keith Tyson, Fabrice Hyber, Kendell Geers, Jason Rhoades, Paul McCarthy, Martin Kersels, Jonathan Meese, Malachi Farrell, Richard Jackson, Christoph Büchel, Maurizio Cattelan, Thomas Hirschhorn. Exh. cat., Paris: Centre Pompidou.

64  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

  5. Coulter-Smith, G. (2006), Deconstructing Installation Art: Fine Art and Media Art, 1986–2006, Southampton: CASIAD, an e-book available at www.installationart.net/index.html; this reference is to www.installationart.net/Chapter1Introduction/introduction02.html (4 August 2008).   6. Bourriaud, N. (2002), Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les presses du reel.

  7. Daviss, B. (2005) ‘Virtual fitness trainer gets pulses racing’, New Scientist, 3 December, http:// www.newscientist.com/article/mg18825281.400.html (29 September 2007, subscription required).

  8. Bürger, P. (1984), Theory of the Avant-Garde, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 53.

  9. Hansen, M. B. N., (2004), New Philosophy for New Media, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, p. 51. 10.  Hansen, M. B. N., (2004), New Philosophy for New Media, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, p. 49. 11.  Hansen, M. B. N., (2004), New Philosophy for New Media, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, p. 51.

12.  Hansen, M. B. N., (2004), New Philosophy for New Media, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, p. 51.

13. Boudourides, M. A. (1995), ‘Chaos and Critical Theory’. Conference paper at Einstein meets Magritte, international conference, Vrije Universiteit, Brussels, 29 May – 3 June. Online version accessed 22 Jan 2009: http://www.math.upatras.gr/~mboudour/articles/cct.html

14. This is perfectly possible as is evident from experiments with sonar-like guidance systems designed for blind people whereby a webcam-like apparatus scans the environment and translates the edges and brightness into varying tones and pitches. Blind users of the system report that after a period of time their brain is able to process this data so seamlessly and automatically that it is almost as if they could ‘see’.

15. Henderson, L. D. (1983), The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. 16. Deleuze, G. (1986), Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Athlone Press. 17.  Bourriaud, N. (2002), Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les presses du reel.

Mapping Outside the Frame  65

From UNCAGED to Cyber-Spatialism Ralf Nuhn

Introduction

The starting point for this paper is my recent project UNCAGED, which is a series of six ‘telesymbiotic’1 installations exploring interrelationships and transitions between screen-based digital environments and their immediate physical surroundings. The underlying motivation behind my approach was to ‘uncage’ screen-based realities from the confines of their digital existence and to bring the remote computer world closer to our human experience. In particular, my approach opposed the notion of immersive virtual reality, where the physical world is more or less excluded from the participants, and instead attempted to situate the virtual domain within the physical world. In the first instance I regarded this project as being an expression of artistic vision led by aesthetic and formal considerations and situated within a broader physicophilosophical context. For instance, I could sense a certain relationship between my approach to the quantum physical notion of non-locality, as proposed by the physicist Niels Bohr, and its implications for the existence of an invisible reality that supports our world – or to put it in different terms, the implication that an action in one part of the world could cause an instantaneous effect in another part of the world without there being a perceivable connection.2 For me traversing the distance between the physical and the screen-based world of computers is an assertion of this idea, even though in my approach the link between the two worlds is of course only a make-believe situation.

The theoretical framework behind UNCAGED

The methodological approach of my project could be best described as experimentation with and reconfiguration of existing technologies, which result in new creative inventions and designs. This ‘blue-sky research’ was led primarily by my artistic taste, personal intuition and experience. However, this does not mean that I worked without any guidelines. In the following section I will attempt to outline the theoretical framework behind my approach, ranging from formal and aesthetic considerations, incorporating aspects of computer science and interaction design, to social implications. Aesthetic and formal considerations Based on some initial practical studies, I conceived a set of aesthetic and formal parameters which would underpin the further development of my work. To give a brief summary, I presumed that the work would consist of screen-based animations as well as (digitally-processed) video material and images, linked to different computercontrolled electronic devices and automated sculptures positioned around the screen. The off-screen devices would be triggered by different events happening in the virtual domain and vice versa. Thus, relationships between what happens on-screen and what

happens off-screen would be established. The linkage would be based primarily on isomorphic visual and audio-visual relationships between both domains. Further, I decided that the work should allow for audience participation through various tangible user interfaces. Even though, artistically, I was mainly interested in the perceptual interaction between on-screen and off-screen artefacts, I believed that the introduction of user interaction would increase the engagement with the exhibits and enhance the linkage between the virtual and the physical world. From a perceptual point of view, the overall vision of my approach may be well illustrated by a certain special effect, sometimes used in films or television advertisements. I am referring to the fictional situation where someone is watching television, and all of a sudden humans, animals or objects start to come out of the television and invade the physical space of the viewer. I envisioned that my approach would to some degree ‘materialise’ the essence of this captivating special effect by creating ‘magical’ relationships between what happens on screen and what happens around the screen. My confidence in the success of this approach was based on my belief that people have a strong liking for make-believe situations; maybe because these defy the rationality of the scientific age we are living in. I hope it will become clear from the project description, that much of what defines my approach relies on people’s fascination with irrational situations, and their willingness to use their own imagination.

68  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

Gaby Wood, when exploring the public’s fascination with Kempelen’s Chess Player automaton in the late eighteenth century, points out that the Chess Player ‘fulfilled what the historian Richard Altick has called “the public’s desire to be baffled”. It didn’t matter how many times the inventor insisted the automaton was merely an “illusion”; it was constructed during the Age of Reason, yet many found reason less appealing than enchantment.’3 Although Wood’s socio-psychological viewpoint is concerned with a situation of more than 200 years ago, I am inclined to argue that it is still (or maybe better, again) applicable to our ultra-technological society. I conceived that the nature of the screen-based visuals as well as the automated sculptures and electronic devices should be fairly crude. In particular, I did not aspire to any form of high-definition realism. This choice was not only based on aesthetic considerations and personal taste, but was also an expression of my belief that the extent of engagement and immersion with a ‘system’ does not depend on the degree to which it imitates the ‘real world’. What is important, in my view, is how much it stimulates the participants’ imaginations and invites them to (playfully) engage. There seems to be a general agreement on this point between two theoreticians who, on the whole, have rather different standpoints regarding modern technologies: the media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who regarded modern technologies as ‘extensions of men’;4 and the postmodern sociologist Jean Baudrillard, who claims that we should see modern technologies rather as ‘expulsions of men’.5 Baudrillard, when discussing the ‘cinematic development from silents to talkies and now to 3D and the current range of special effects’, argues that the ‘cinematographic illusion faded as the technical prowess increased […] The more we move towards the

perfect definition, that useless perfection, the more the power of the illusion is lost.’6 Baudrillard illustrates his position with the following example: to appreciate this [Baudrillard’s point made above], one only has to think of the Peking Opera and how, with the mere movement of their bodies, the old man and the girl brought to life on the stage the sheer size of the river and how, in the duel scene, the two bodies, skimming each other with their weapons yet not touching, made the darkness in which the duel took place tangible. That was total illusion – an ecstasy more physical and material than aesthetic or theatrical, precisely because all realist presence of the night or the river had been excised. Today, they would pipe tons of water into the studio, and the duel would be shot in the darkness with infra-red cameras.7

McLuhan expresses a similar view on the issue of high-definition in his concept of ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ media. According to him, a hot medium is one that extends one single sense in ‘high-definition’. High-definition is the state of being well-filled with data. A photograph is, visually ‘high-definition’. A cartoon is ‘low-definition’, simply because very little visual information is provided […] hot media do not leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience. Hot media are therefore, low in participation or completion by the audience.’8 It should be obvious from the above outline that my approach would best fit within the category of ‘cool’ media, and following McLuhan, is therefore ‘high’ in terms of ‘participation or completion by the audience’. As mentioned above, the linkage between the virtual and the physical domain would be based on visual and audio-visual relationships between both domains. With regard to the audio-visual aspect, I am particularly interested in the notion of ‘synchresis’ that was coined by the French composer/film-maker/critic Michel Chion and which refers to the cerebral process of ‘forging an immediate and necessary relationship between something one sees and something one hears at the same time.’9

From UNCAGED to Cyber-Spatialism  69

For me, the most interesting aspect of synchresis is that it ‘can even work out of thin air – that is, with images and sounds that strictly speaking have nothing to do with each other, forming monstrous yet inevitable and irresistible agglomerations in our perception.’10 This phenomenon is highly relevant for my work, because the sounds are created by computer-controlled electromechanical devices in the physical domain and are linked to visual events happening on the screen. Hence, the sounds and the on-screen visuals have no inherent relationship, but the linkage is solely constructed in the mind of the viewer. For instance, in a preliminary experiment which would later be developed into the installation Square Pusher (see below), I linked the movements of a bouncing on-screen square with the sound of an electromechanical hammer hitting a wooden board placed underneath the monitor screen. In this example, the user ‘throws’ an animated square on a touch-screen. Each time the square bounces off the bottom of the screen the hammer hits the wooden board. Although the bouncing movements of the square and the sounds created by the hammer have obviously no ‘real’ cause and effect relationship, I believe that a more or less inevitable linkage between the two is formed in the mind of the participant. With regard to the aim of UNCAGED to bridge

the gap between the virtual and the physical world, one could argue that the vibrations and ‘live’ sounds (in contrast to recorded or synthesized sounds) synchronised to the square’s movement imply a materialisation of the virtual image and create the illusion of the square being a heavy physical object. Human-computer interaction Although my interest in the notion of mixed reality was primarily inspired by the development of playful, perceptually-intriguing art installations rather than the desire to develop new technologies to be used in a scientific or commercial context, I could sense the potential relevance of my approach to issues concerning computer sciences; e.g. in the area of HCI (Human-Computer Interaction). In particular, I anticipated that the practical work might be able to address some of our difficulties in engaging with computers in a meaningful and satisfying way. UNCAGED may also be viewed as a response to my research at the University of Sheffield, conducted between June 2001 and June 2002. My investigations for the University of Sheffield were based on a qualitative analysis of electro-acoustic composers ‘at work’ and demonstrated that many composers who work with computer-based systems ‘suffer’ from the distance between the physical reality and virtual computer data. For instance, my study revealed ‘a need for more direct, tactile means of seeking and manipulating sounds in composition and performance [which] was expressed by the desire for malleable interfaces that would allow for a sculptural shaping of sounds.’11

70  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

Regarding the design of appropriate physical input interfaces for UNCAGED, I was very much stimulated by the approach taken by the Tangible Media Group at the MIT Media Laboratory. They advocate the use of everyday objects as a basis for input devices with the rationale of looking ‘towards the bounty of richly-afforded physical devices of the last few millennia and inventing ways to reapply these elements of tangible media augmented by digital technology.’12 One of the works by the Tangible Media Group comprises a bottle interface – a glass bottle with a cork.13 The bottle is connected to a computer via wireless sensing technology. By means of small electromagnetic resonator tags placed around the opening of the bottle it is possible to detect when the cork is in place or removed from the bottle. The bottle interface is used in the sound installation musicBottles, which comprises three glass bottles, each stoppered with corks. Removing a cork triggers a particular soundtrack to start and replacing a cork stops the music. Conceptually, it was important for the group to maintain the coherence between the new digital meaning of the interface and its everyday functionality as a physical object. The basic ‘affordance’14 of a bottle is of course to store content and in the installation this content is represented by musical sound. According to the Tangible Media Group participants quickly understood the bottle metaphor and despite its simplicity most people enjoyed the interaction and often reacted emotionally to it. For me, the approach taken by the Tangible Media Group was an assertion of my belief that user interaction with computer-based systems should be an organic extension of our interaction with the physical world, rather than a showcase for new technological possibilities that bear no resemblance to our normal interaction with the world.

Even though the final exhibits do not involve everyday objects as such, they are designed to be evocative of familiar forms of interaction and are often reminiscent of familiar games or childhood themes. For example the exhibit Blow Life (see below) includes a ‘hand interface’, which is similar to the interface of a fortune-telling machine of the type often found at funfairs. The exhibit Glitchy & Scratchy (see below) features two virtual records on a touch screen. I assumed that many people would have the urge to spin the records on the screen as a DJ might do, and certainly would have some preconceived idea of how to do so. Further, I thought that, where appropriate, a simple push-button interface allowing participants to activate or play with an exhibit would be preferable to a more complex interface such as that of a motion capture device. I would therefore suggest that to a great extent the user interfaces of UNCAGED aim to involve the participant(s) in a very straightforward way by appropriating wellestablished forms (of interaction) from the ‘physical’ world. What is new in UNCAGED is how the participants’ engagement affects the interaction between the physical and the screen-based world of the exhibits. Social interaction In a public (art) exhibition context, my work also seemed to address issues regarding social interaction and was motivated in particular by recent studies by the Work, Interaction and Technology group (WIT) at King’s College London which suggest that most conventional screen-based exhibits in galleries and museums ‘not only undermine co-participation and collaboration at the exhibit itself, but remove the possibility of others seeing and making relevant sense of what people are doing elsewhere within the scene’. Their research suggests that ‘whilst interactive exhibits, in particular those relying on computing and information technologies, can often enhance an individual’s experience, they inadvertently impoverish the social interaction which can arise with and around exhibits in museums and galleries.’15 I was curious to find out if my ‘screenbased’ approach could evade the problem of inhibiting social interaction amongst gallery audiences because of its extension into the physical domain, and if it would make possible shared experiences amongst participants. The photographs and videos of UNCAGED can be viewed at the project website www. telesymbiosis.com (active 30 May 2008). UNCAGED comprises six interactive installations which are linked by a common theme: to explore interrelationships and transitions between screen-based digital environments and their immediate physical surroundings. UNCAGED incorporates electromechanical devices and automated sculptures which interact, visually and acoustically, with computer-generated animations and video images. Most of the exhibits are reminiscent of familiar games or feature modified toys, and participants can engage playfully with the installations via touch-screens and tangible custom-made interfaces.

From UNCAGED to Cyber-Spatialism  71

Description of the UNCAGED series

Blow Life is reminiscent of the fortune-telling machines often found at funfairs. Participants cover a hand image in front of a computer screen with their own hand. This activates an electric fan, mounted next to the screen, blowing an on-screen barcode like ‘grass in the wind’. After a few seconds the fan stops and participants receive their own ‘lucky number’ encrypted into a new, randomly generated barcode. A direct video link is available at www.telesymbiosis.com/movies/blowlife_hi.mov (active 30 May 2008). Bubblelabub comprises a screen display featuring a person blowing air into a tube. The tube is extended from the virtual image to a real glass bottle filled with water. Depending on the amount of pressure applied to a squeezable interface at the front of the exhibit, the cheeks of the on-screen person will inflate or deflate, and the amount of bubbles generated in the water bottle will vary accordingly. Contrary to the exhibit Blow Life, where the airflow of a fan triggers movements on the screen, Bubblelabub creates the illusion that air generated within the virtual domain can transfuse into the physical world. A direct video link is available at www.telesymbiosis.com/movies/ bubblelabub_hi.mov (active 30 May 2008). Glitchy & Scratchy allows the user to spin two records on a touch-screen, backwards and forwards. The turntables (with vinyl records) on either side of the screen follow the spin direction and (variable) speed of the respective virtual record. Pressing the left or right button at the front of the screen repeats the most recent scratching pattern of the respective record. A direct video link is available at www.telesymbiosis.com/movies/ glitchyandscratchy_hi.mov (active 30 May 2008).

72  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

Square Pusher is similar to the traditional funfair game known as Ring-the-Bell or Easy Striker. Like the traditional game, it features a bell mounted high above the ground. Participants ‘throw’ a bouncy square on a touch screen. If they hit the top centre of the screen the bell will ring, and they will earn a ‘100 point bonus’. When the square bounces off the bottom of the screen it triggers a banging sound and vibrations, which are caused by an electromechanical hammer hidden underneath the screen. A direct video link is available at http://www.telesymbiosis.com/movies/squarepusher_hi.mov (active 30 May 2008). PONG (telesymbiotic version) is a modified version of the renowned video game Pong. Two solenoid ‘bats’ are mounted at the edge of a computer screen, one on the left and one on the right. Using a push-button interface, player(s) trigger the bats to keep a moving on-screen ball in play. If the ball is missed, it will disappear from the screen. A direct video link is available at www.telesymbiosis.com/movies/blowlife_hi.mov (active 30 May 2008). Not Only Jingle Bells for Two Spuikars and Other Players is an orchestra of automated acoustic instruments, most of which are based on toys, that provide ‘live’ soundtracks to various on-screen animations. On the initial screen-display participants can select from four buttons. When the bottom button is selected the display will change into an interface of 39 ‘idle musicians’. Each musician is linked to a different sound in the orchestra of acoustic instruments. The musicians are animated by the touch of a finger, triggering their respective sound. With the top three buttons of the initial display, participants can

select from three different ready-made clips. A direct video link is available at www. telesymbiosis.com/movies/jinglebells_hi.mov (active 30 May 2008).

After UNCAGED

Throughout the early stages of the research and development phase of UNCAGED, but in particular after the work had been completed, I questioned my initial motivation, that is to ‘uncage’ computer-based realities from the confines of their digital existence and to bring the remote computer world closer to our human experience. I believe that my reservations about this rather positivistic motivation arose from two coinciding, arguably interrelated, notions. First, my critical engagement with the work itself nourished the impression that despite the perceptual fusion between the digital and the physical world, UNCAGED actually seems to highlight the distance between the two domains. In my view, all six exhibits have an underlying absurdity which arises from the very fusion of their physical and digital components. For me, this absurdity ultimately hints at the fallacy of the initial motivation behind UNCAGED and in a wider context, questions the idea of seeking a place for meaningful human exchange and experiences in virtual worlds. Second, temporally coinciding with, but not necessarily causally linked to, the creation of UNCAGED, my former enthusiasm for the computer as a working tool was clouded by a growing frustration with, and to put it bluntly, dislike of spending a good deal of my life (isolated) in front of the computer screen. Admittedly, in the light of my original motivation, one could argue that the very objective of UNCAGED was precisely about improving our relationship with digital technology, and that therefore UNCAGED could be regarded as a step towards overcoming my own frustration with the computer. I do believe that UNCAGED is successful in bridging the gap between the digital world and the physical world on a perceptual basis, and I feel the six installations certainly incorporate digital technology in a rather enjoyable and stimulating way. However, for me the fusion between the digital and the physical world in UNCAGED only works within the context of installation art or games. Ultimately, when applied to ‘real life’, it does not offer much hope toward making the digital world a more satisfying space to engage with. From UNCAGED to Cyber-Spatialism  73

Not surprisingly my new ‘attitude’ towards UNCAGED had a strong impact on the direction of my artistic practice. Initially, I intended to create a body of work subsequent to UNCAGED, where the transition between the physical and the virtual world as well as the user interaction would be more seamless. I assume that it is obvious from my concerns, described above, that a development of UNCAGED in this (positivistic) direction would have been extremely pretentious. Instead my new artistic direction is not concerned with perfecting the perceptual and interactive level of UNCAGED (i.e. through technological advancement), but with exploring further the socio-philosophical issues implied in UNCAGED. In this context I am particularly interested in the writings of French theorist Jean Baudrillard. Despite the dangers of over-simplifying, even misunderstanding, his often ambiguous messages, I feel that UNCAGED, in particular in the light of my revised interpretation of the work, addresses some of the issues raised in Baudrillard’s texts.

Fig. 1  (Top left) Ralf Nuhn, Toaster mit Schnittstelle, 2004. Electric toaster, Sub-D type computer connector. Fig. 2  (Above) Ralf Nuhn, Two networked toasters, 2004. Electric toasters, Sub-D type computer connectors, computer cable.

74  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

Fig. 3  (Left) Ralf Nuhn, Four networked toasters with hub, 2005. Electric toasters, Sub-D type computer connectors, computer cables.

For instance, Baudrillard differentiates between the ‘real’ as the world we perceive rationally and try to explain scientifically, and the notion of a ‘true real’ which hides behind the ‘real’ through illusion – defined as ‘the radical impossibility of a real presence of things or beings, their definite absence from themselves.’16 According to Baudrillard, ‘it is not, then, the real which is the opposite of simulation [virtuality] – the real is merely a particular case of that simulation – but illusion.’17 For Baudrillard, this illusion is vital to keep alive such notions as singularity, alterity, secret and seduction, which provide a necessary counterbalance to our, in his view, over-rationalised and (technologically) fully-realised world. ‘Against this artificial paradise of technicity and virtuality, against the attempt to build a world completely positive, rational, and true, we must save the traces of the illusory world’s definite opacity and mystery.’18 In Baudrillard’s view, we are now faced with a fundamental extermination of this illusion, because through the omnipresence of virtual technologies we are moving towards a ‘hyperrealist world where any direct experiences [of the world] are replaced by televised [computerised] images.’19

Fig. 4  Ralf Nuhn, Cyber-Spatialism 1, 2005. Water-based paint and Sub-D type computer connectors on canvas, 27x35cm. Fig. 5  Ralf Nuhn, Cyber-Spatialism 1, detail. Fig. 6  Luigi Fontana, Concetto Spaziale – Attese, 1967. Water-based paint on canvas, 50 x 62cm.

As a very direct response to my reservations and my increasingly critical view on digital technology, I have created a series of apparently computer-controllable, networked toasters (Figs. 1, 2 and 3). Essentially, the work aims to ridicule our obsession with computerising and automating an increasingly large part of our environment.

By substituting Fontana’s slashes with computer connectors, Cyber-Spatialism implies an extension of the canvas into cyberspace, and thus attempts to address the notion that in today’s world physical space is increasingly being replaced by virtual space. With regard to colour, pattern and relative dimensions, Cyber-Spatialism is closely based on Fontana’s ‘originals’ in order to make the relation between the two series more perceptible (Figs. 4, 5 and 6).

From UNCAGED to Cyber-Spatialism  75

Finally, my most recent project, ‘Cyber-Spatialism’, is a series of canvases in which computer connectors are inserted (Figs. 4 and 5). The work refers to Luigi Fontana’s (1899–1968) series of slashed canvases (Attese) and his concept of Spatialism (Concetto Spaziale), which is usually regarded as an attempt to overcome the illusionistic representation of space in painting by introducing physical space.

Notes   1. The term telesymbiosis is used in biological research and literally means ‘symbiosis at a distance’. It has been adopted to describe the quasi-symbiotic relationships – between the physical world and the distant computer world – in UNCAGED. Admittedly, the term might be misleading as it is also used (synonymously with the term telepresence) in the context of virtual reality, where it refers to a person’s feeling of being present in a virtual or remote environment.   2. cf. McEvoy, J.P., Zarate, O., (1999), [1996], Introducing Quantum Theory, Duxford: Icon Books Ltd.   3. Wood, G., (2002), Living Dolls, London: Faber and Faber.

  4.  McLuhan, M., (1994), [1964], Understanding Media, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.   5.  Baudrillard, J., (1996), [1995], The Perfect Crime, London: Verso.   6.  Baudrillard, J., (1996), [1995], The Perfect Crime, London: Verso.   7.  Baudrillard, J., (1996), [1995], The Perfect Crime, London: Verso.

  8.  McLuhan, M., (1994), [1964], Understanding Media, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.   9.  Chion, M., (1994), Audio-Vision, New York: Columbia University Press.

10.  Chion, M., (1994), Audio-Vision, New York: Columbia University Press.

11. Nuhn, R., Eaglestone, B.M., Ford, N., Moore, A., Brown, G., (2002), ‘A Qualitative Analysis of Composers at Work’, Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference, 2002, Göteborg.

12. Ishii, H., Ullmer, B., (1997), ‘Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces between People, Bits and Atoms’, Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1997, Atlanta, Georgia.

13. cf. Ishii, H., Mazalek, A., Lee, J., (2001), ‘Bottles as a Minimal Interface to Access Digital Information’, Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2001, Seattle, Washington. 14. Affordance is a property of an object that determines or indicates how that object can be used. Affordances may be actual physical properties, or perceived properties. The term was first introduced by psychologist James J. Gibson in 1966.

76  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

15. Heath, C., Lehm, D., (2003), ‘Misconstruing Interaction’, Conference Proceedings: Interactive Learning in Museums of Art and Design, 2002, London. 16. Baudrillard, J., (2000), The Vital Illusion, New York: Columbia University Press. 17. Baudrillard, J., (1996), [1995], The Perfect Crime, London: Verso.

18. Baudrillard, J., (2000), The Vital Illusion, New York: Columbia University Press. 19. Baudrillard, J., (1993), [1990], The Transparency of Evil London: Verso.

Digital Presence

When Presence-absence Becomes Patternrandomness: Blast Theory’s Can You See Me Now? Maria Chatzichristodoulou [aka maria x]

This paper looks at the work of the internationally renowned British group, Blast Theory (www.blasttheory.co.uk). More specifically, it concentrates on Blast Theory’s awardwinning installation/performance/game piece Can You See Me Now? produced in 2001 but still active today (November 2006).1 Can You See Me Now? is a chase game that takes place simultaneously online, within a virtual city in cyberspace, and in the streets of a ‘real’, physical city. While exploring CYSMN? I ask questions about the notion of ‘presence’ as both a concept and a tangible state of being. In the first instance I am using the notions of presence and absence to describe the condition and experience of situating (for presence) or excluding (for absence) one’s corporeal body and ‘aura’ within/from a specific spatiotemporal context, and a set of relationalities that include (the) ‘other(s)’.2 I ask: What is the meaning of presence within a postmodern, posthuman, and ‘post-media’ context? What is at stake when presence becomes telematic, distributed and/or hybrid? What happens when presence and absence cease to exist as polar opposites? When presence becomes, to quote Derrida, ‘impregnated with absence’? When presence and absence blend into each other, in a paradoxical state of presence-absence?

Can You See Me Now?

Since 2000, Blast Theory has collaborated with the Mixed Reality Lab (University of Nottingham) in order to explore the convergence of Internet and mobile technologies and create ‘new forms of performance and interactive art mixing audiences across the Internet, live performance and digital broadcasting’.3 This practice of mixing diverse audiences, media and genres characterises CYSMN?, a piece which verges on the edge of several genres such as gaming, interactive art, and live performance, mixes physical and virtual spacetimes, and spreads its participants (runners, players, involuntary audiences) across these spacetimes and their dissimilar ontologies. In CYSMN? the players can be physically located anywhere in the world. By logging on the group’s website they find themselves ‘re-located’ within a virtual city, together with other players and members of Blast Theory, called ‘runners’. The presence of both the players and the runners in the virtual city is avatar-mediated. At the same time, the runners are located within the streets of a physical city, which they use as their game terrain/stage.4 Each runner is equipped with a hand-held computer connected to a Global Positioning System (GPS) tracker. The hand-held computer sends the runner’s location from the tracker over a wireless network to people playing online, whereas the positions of players online are passed back the other way and displayed on the screen of the

runner’s computer. Alongside this, online players can communicate with each other through text messaging, and runners can communicate with each other through walkietalkies. An audio streaming of the runners’ walkie-talkies allows the online players to eavesdrop on the runners’ discussions.5 The aim of the game is for the runners to chase and ‘catch’ the online players. While the runners chase the players, and the players try to escape the runners, the two cities, ‘real’ and virtual, meet and merge into one hybrid city built from overlapping layers of physical and digital spacetime. Each layer of spacetime is characterised by different qualities and behaviours. As Blast Theory put it ‘the virtual city (…) has an elastic relationship to the real city. At times the two cities seem identical (…). At other times the two cities diverge and appear very remote from one another.’6 From this process of merging and diverging, bringing together and tearing apart of the two cities, CYSMN? produces a new space which is neither physical nor virtual. It is, instead, hybrid and relational, that is, a space that pertains and belongs to the connection between physical and virtual, as well as a space created from the players’ interactions with each other and their game terrain. This hybrid city cannot exist outside the relations that occur between the different layers of spacetime and the different people that ‘inhabit’ these through their involvement in the game.

80  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

Blast Theory describe the conceptual background of the piece as drawing upon their fascination with the ubiquity – in many western countries – of hand-held electronic devices such as the mobile phone, and the way this changes and ‘augments’ our urban environments. The mobile phone blurs the boundaries between private and public space by ‘broadcasting’ fragments of private information into the public arena, thus staging little private dramas. The presence of (involuntary) audiences alters the actual nature of these private instances, transforming them into public spectacles, whereas the people involved in these become performers who ‘act out’ their everyday lives. Through this exploration around the merging of private and public spaces, Blast Theory ask: ‘In what ways can we talk about intimacy in the electronic realm?’ I suggest that intertwined with issues of intimacy are ideas of presence and absence. CYSMN? uses the overlay of this emergent hybrid city to explore such ideas. The issue of presence-absence is posed from the very beginning of the game. When you log online to ‘meet’ the runners, you find the following information: a photo and the name of each runner, as well as a text introducing a person each one of them has not seen for a long time but still thinks about. For the 2005 presentation of CYSMN? at the Chicago Museum of Modern Art, for example, Runner 1, Matt, talks about Lucy, a girl he was friends with when she lived in Birmingham, but hasn’t seen for many years.7 Matt says that, although friends, their lives were very different and never overlapped. He doesn’t know where Lucy lives any more, but he thinks of her every now and then, and misses her.8 Runner 2, Simon, talks about Dwielio, a man he met while busking in Spain. Dwielio was a man without nationality who was illegal in every country. Simon thinks about him and he would like to speak to him again.9 Once you log on to the virtual city of CYSMN? as a player, you are also asked to name of a person who is absent from your life (someone you have not seen for a long time) but present in your mind (someone you still think about). Once this person is identified

Fig. 1  Blast Theory, Can You See Me Now?, 2001 © Blast Theory

(becomes ‘virtually’ present), no other reference is made about him/her (considered absent) until the end of the game, when you are caught by a runner. To signify her victory, the runner says: ‘Runner 1 has seen -------’ speaking aloud not your name, but the name of the person you have identified as someone you still think about (thus signifying a presence which contradicts an apparent absence). I ask, is this person present or absent? If present, within which layers of space, time, and memory is her presence situated? How is her presence manifested? Does the identification and sharing of her absence make her – virtually – present? Does the speaking out loud of her name – virtually – situate her within the urban landscape?

When Presence-absence Becomes Pattern-randomness  81

This is not the only occasion where the boundaries between presence and absence blur in a CYSMN? performance-game. For example, the online players are both present (in the hybrid city) and absent (in a corporeal form, from the physical city); the runners are present (in the hybrid city) and absent (in the proximity of the players). Finally, when a player is caught the runners take photos of the exact physical location where each player was ‘spotted’. These photos, called ‘sightings’, are then uploaded to the website, functioning as an abstract, minimal but also poignant documentation for each game. What do these fragmented, empty spaces stand for? I see the sightings (both their picture-taking and their sharing) as a powerful, poetic act of interweaving the digital, virtual and abstract into the physical, tangible and real, while also augmenting the physical, tangible and real and thus limited with another layer of abstraction and relationality. While weaving the physical and digital (similar to Benjamin’s understanding of aura that weaves time and space), these sightings forever link both the (present-absent) player and the (absent-present) person in her mind to an anonymous square of a cityscape (which maybe none of them has ever physically visited). Thus the sightings interweave absence with presence as much as they interweave physicality with digitality, creating unique, hybrid loci. To my eyes, these photos are the most succinct, poetic, and beautiful visual articulation of the presentabsent state a cyborgian creature finds itself in. The player is there, in the picture (Figs. 1–3). Can you see him or her now?10

Fig. 2  Blast Theory, Can You See Me Now?, 2001 © Blast Theory

Presence-absence and pattern-randomness

82  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

Performance theorist Peggy Phelan, in her book Unmarked, claims that in performance ‘the body is metonymic of self, of character, of voice, of “presence”’.11 I ask, what happens when it comes to fully- or partly- mediated, networked, and other forms of technologised performance, such as Blast Theory’’s CYSMN? As discussed, in CYSMN? the runners’ corporeal bodies are situated within the urban landscape, dispersed around the city and constantly in motion rather than being concentrated within the physical proximity of their audiences/players. Does this mean that, as far as the players are concerned, the runners are absent (as performers during the game/performance), because the runners’ bodies are absent from their physical proximity? Does the absence of the runners’ corporeal bodies in the proximity of the players entail absence of the runners themselves? Media theorist and artist Allucquère Rosanne Stone points out that ‘the coupling between our bodies and our selves is a powerfully contested site’.12 Stone shows in her book The War of Desire and Technology how this site is being claimed by everyone, from governments to technologists, from scholars to the media, everybody fighting for their own right to control ‘the epistemic structures by which bodies mean.’13 Indeed, bodies mean, and that applies to all bodies, whether corporeal, virtual, synthetic, posthuman, cyborgian, or other. It is safe to argue that the relationship between body and self, in performance as much as in everyday life, is a complex and multi-faceted one. If we accept this, can we also accept that the contested site between body and self be approached as a metonymic relationship of the body to the self? In short, does ‘body’ stand for ‘self’? When it comes to the analysis of networked performance practices such as CYSMN?, I ask, which body are we talking about? The runners’ corporeal bodies embedded within the urban landscape? The runners’ digital bodies manifested as avatars online? And are these distinct from each other? Or are we talking about the players’ bodies? In which case, are we talking about their corporeal bodies, dispersed around the world or the digital avatars through which they manifest their presence online? Which of these

Fig. 3  Blast Theory, Can You See Me Now?, 2001 © Blast Theory

bodies – if any – can be considered as a metonymy of the self? Which of these bodies stands for presence? And what is presence within this context? I suggest that Phelan’s discourse refers to visceral performance staged in physical space, where the body is corporeal, one-and-only, unique, tangible, well-defined, and limited; where the body exists ‘in the plenitude of its apparent visibility and availability’.14

Kusahara, for example, compares telematics with photography in the way space and time are being ‘copy-pasted’ and reconfigured in both these practices.16 Kusahara believes that our culture is undergoing a drastic change in terms of our physical and physiological relationship with space and bodies – our own and those of others. Within this framework, Kusahara doubts the very knowledge provided by her own senses, approaching digital technology as a ‘potential trickster’: ‘Digital technology … has brought us the notion of disembodied presence. We can no longer simply believe what our eyes see and our ears hear.’ She goes on to use telerobotics – which allow for the control of a robot over distance – as an example: via telerobotics, one can either use the robot as one’s machinic avatar in a distant physical space, or simply manifest one’s presence over geographical distance through directing the robot’s movement. But this

When Presence-absence Becomes Pattern-randomness  83

N. Katherine Hayles, on the other hand, discusses situations that occur in virtual reality environments, where ‘the avatar both is and is not present, just as the user both is and is not inside the screen.’ (Hayles employs the term ‘avatar’ to refer to the user of a virtual reality (VR) environment. I suggest that the same applies to augmented and other hybrid environments; in the case of CYSMN? the term ‘user’ could apply to both the runners and the players.) She points out that when it comes to such environments ‘questions about presence and absence do not yield much leverage’.15 Hayles is not the first to observe the failure of the presence-absence dialectic to adequately apply to, describe, and/or serve to analyse situations that occur within such encounters. Theorists such as Sherry Turkle, Allucquère Rosanne Stone, Machiko Kusahara, Ken Goldberg, and artists such as Stelarc and Eduardo Kac, have all observed the shortcomings of the presence-absence dialectic within this context, and have tackled this in different ways through their work.

is not quite as simple as it seems, Kusahara points out, because: ‘how do others know that the robot is operated by a real person? And how do we know that the robot is representing the world accurately back to us?’ In short, the notion of presence appears to be fairly straightforward as long as the performance encounters are the visceral ones Phelan refers to. In networked, mediated, and other encounters though, as demonstrated by our discussion on CYSMN?, ‘presence’ is not equally straightforward. When it comes to such encounters, the bodily presence, self-evident in its corporeality – the pure, ‘absolute’ presence, as we know it from the physical world (that is, the opposite of absence) – mutates into something else. This new morphing of ‘presence’ is no more distinct from – let alone opposed to – the notion of absence. Within this context presence can be perceived as absence and the reverse; presence and absence become interwoven like two sides of the same coin, impossible to disengage: they become a presence-absence.

84  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

This paradoxical state of presence-absence is a hybrid between relative physical absence or dislocation (the user’s corporeal body is absent/dislocated in relation to a partner or a physical action, either periodically or throughout the encounter/ action), and relational presence (despite her/his physical absence/dislocation the user can still relate to the partner or take part in the action via a medium).17 I argue that this paradoxical, hybrid state-of-being calls for new approaches to the notions of presence and absence. Once the self exceeds and expands the limits of the corporeal, human body to exist as a cyborg, ‘a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction’,18 physical proximity/distance no more constitute criteria for presence and absence. Hence presence and absence can no longer be safely identified as conditions or attributed as qualities. Certainties dissolve, as the presence-absence state is based on doubt: presence needs to be manifested in order to be perceived; and it needs to establish the validity of its manifestation(s) for it to be accepted as an ‘authentic’ condition or quality. Even so, it incorporates and co-exists with (physical) absence. Absence, on the other hand, also needs to be secured, whereas it can no more be safely assumed to be pure, vacant of any presence. N. Katherine Hayles, through her book How We Became Posthuman, has offered a complementary dialectic that can overcome the conceptual dead-ends presence and absence lead to when applied to networked communication and performance practices.19 Hayles argues that information is pattern rather than presence. This does not imply that non-information is the absence of pattern, that is, randomness: scientific developments such as chaos and complexity theories have shown that information can be identified, paradoxically, with both pattern and randomness. Pattern-randomness does not form a binary opposition in the way presence-absence does, since randomness is not seen as the absence of pattern, but as the ground for pattern to emerge. For that reason, pattern-randomness does not follow the same set of oppositional strategies as presence-absence. Instead, they are bound together in a dialectic that makes them complementary to one another. Since pattern and randomness are complementary rather than oppositional, we do not need to distinguish between one or the other: a system can integrate both and so normally does.

Hayles argues in favour of a shift of focus towards the pattern-randomness dialectic which, she claims, is more appropriate for the discussion and analysis of hybrid states-of-being. She suggests that we look at notions of pattern, as the outcome of our interactions with the system and other users, as complementary to presence; and at notions of randomness, as the outcome of the noise created by stimuli that cannot be encoded within the system, as complementary to absence. Randomness can turn into pattern when extraneous stimuli merge together, whereas pattern can gradually fade into randomness. Pattern-randomness systems, explains Hayles, evolve towards an open future marked by unpredictability, unlike presence-absence systems that evolve towards a known end. That is because, in presence-absence systems, the metaphysics of presence have front-loaded meaning into the system by assuming the existence of a stable origin.20 Unlike that, pattern-randomness systems have not been front-loaded with meaning, as they are not based on any coherent origin. Meaning is made possible – though not inevitable – by evolution.

One might speculate that the boundaries of our bodies will continue to dissolve and that the question ‘Who am I?’ will become less relevant in the future, replaced by ‘What is all that I can be?’22

Notes   1. Interactive Art, Prix Ars Electronica 2003 among other awards and nominations. See www. blasttheory.co.uk/bt/work_cysmn.html (active 8 May 2008).   2. ‘Aura’ is, according to Walter Benjamin: ‘A strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance or semblance of distance…’. Benjamin, W. (1974), ‘A Small History of Photography’, One-Way Street and Other Writings, transl. by Jephcott, E., Shorter, K., London: NLB, (1979), p. 250.   3. Can You See Me Now? was a collaboration of Blast Theory with the Mixed Reality Lab, University of Nottingham, supported by Arts Council England. See www.mrl.nott.ac.uk. Citation

When Presence-absence Becomes Pattern-randomness  85

I want to argue that the pattern-randomness dialectic is more appropriate for the analysis of networked performance encounters, such as the one presented by Blast Theory’s piece CYSMN? This is exactly because this dialectic, unlike the presenceabsence one, does not assume a coherent origin and thus a pre-loaded set of meanings. Because it starts as free of meaning and oppositional strategies, the pattern-randomness dialectic is also free of any pre-loaded sets of moral judgements. This absence of pre-loaded meanings and judgements creates a vacant space, an emptiness, which allows for the unforeseen, unfamiliar, and novel to occur. I suggest that the liberating potential of this dialectic is very useful for the analysis of phenomena that are emergent and still in flux, and could thus profit from this positive ‘lack’ – such as posthuman bodies, hybrid spacetimes, and networked performance and performative encounters. Thus, I suggest that the CYSMN? players can be described, at any given moment throughout the game, as ‘more present than absent’ or the reverse. This may also be articulated as ‘producing more pattern than randomness’ through their connections and engagements with the system and other users.21 Through these encounters develop patterns, which gradually fade into randomness, which again coalesces into pattern, and so on.

is after: Blast Theory Can You See Me Now?, www.blasttheory.co.uk/bt/work_cysmn.html (both URLs active 8 May 2008).

  4. Unfortunately, I think, there is a clear distinction between the artists-‘runners’ who are based on the streets of the physical city, and the audiences-players who can participate online but cannot become runners themselves. The players, although they can interact with the runners, are not invited to immerse themselves within the physical urban environment and are thus limited to experiencing the game through a computer-screen interface. This is not the case in other works of Blast Theory such as Uncle Roy All Around You (2003). For more information on this piece see www.blasttheory.co.uk/bt/work_uncleroy.html (active 8 May 2008).   5. See www.blasttheory.co.uk/bt/work_cysmn.html (active 8 May 2008).

  6. All Blast Theory citations are after www.blasttheory.co.uk/bt/work_cysmn.html (active 8 May 2008).

  7. CYSMN? by Blast Theory in collaboration with the Mixed Reality Lab, University of Nottingham, Chicago Museum of Modern Art, 3–5 November 2005. See http://www.canyouseemenow. co.uk/chicago/en/intro.php (active 4 November 2006).   8. See www.canyouseemenow.co.uk/chicago/en/runner01.php (active 4 November 2006).   9. See www.canyouseemenow.co.uk/chicago/en/runner02.php (active 4 November 2006).

10. To see the player visit www.canyouseemenow.co.uk/sheffield/sightings.html, www. canyouseemenow.co.uk/v2/photos.html, www.canyouseemenow.co.uk/tokyo/en sightings. php, www.canyouseemenow.co.uk/koln/ (all URLs active 8 November 2006). 11. Phelan, P. (1993), Unmarked: the Politics of Performance, London and New York: Routledge, p. 150.

12. Stone, A. R. (1995), The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age, Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, p. 84. 13.  ibid, p. 84.

86  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

14. Phelan, P. (1993), Unmarked: the Politics of Performance, London and New York: Routledge, p. 150.

15. Hayles, N. K. (1999), How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, p. 27. Hayles refers to VR technologies rather than technologised performance practices. Nevertheless, I consider that these technologies raise issues around presence and absence that apply to most emergent, hybrid forms of performance that employ telematic, networking and/or other digital technologies. 16. Kusahara, M. (2000), ‘Presence, Absence, and Knowledge in Telerobotic Art’, The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet, Goldberg, K. (ed.), Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, citations are to p. 199f.

17. I am referring to ‘relative physical absence’ as I consider that physical presence depends not just on the corporeal body but also on a socially constructed self situated within a specific social, spatial and temporal context, which overlaps with but also exceeds and expands the body. 18. Haraway, D. J. (1991), ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: the Reinvention of Nature, London: Free Association Books, p. 150.

19. Hayles, N. K. (1999), How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. For a detailed analysis of the pattern-randomness dichotomy see pp. 25–27.

20. Hayles, op. cit., p. 285, refers to the work of Jacques Derrida on the metaphysics of presence (in Of Grammatology), where presence is allied with Logos, God and teleology. 21. According to Anna Munster, who quotes Steven Shaviro, connection is to the network (and away from sociality), whereas engagement is an active and ongoing social confrontation. See Munster, A. (2006) Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics, Hanover, New Hampshire: Dartmouth College Press, p. 152. 22. Paul, C. (2002) ‘Cyborg as Cyberbody’, ArtLab23, Issue 1, Spring 2002, www.artlab23.net/ issue1/Cyborg.html (active 8 May 2008).

When Presence-absence Becomes Pattern-randomness  87

The Digital Image and the Pleasure Principle: The Consumption of Realism in the Age of Simulation Hamid van Koten

Introduction

Digital technology has restructured much of our working environment; it has rapidly become the dominant provider of mass entertainment, and increasingly it provides extensions to our social networks. This paper attempts to evaluate the digital environment in a number of diverse ways. I believe there is value in a diversity of approach and that we need to study the digital environment both in pragmatic and materialist ways, as well as approach it from more speculative and idealist perspectives. The theoretical frameworks which have come from literature, philosophy, gender studies and so on, have been instrumental in finding ways of understanding the sociological and philosophical implications of media other than through a technological determinist model such as McLuhan’s. Among the questions I explore are: What are the forces at work in the production and consumption of new digital representations? For example, what makes digital gaming so popular? What are the narratives and representational issues involved and what do these tell us about our culture and ourselves? Specifically this paper seeks to uncover two themes: narrative and realism as the dominant forms of digital representations in terms of production, and the Lacanian shift from the real to the imaginary as the dominant drive towards the consumption of these representations.

McLuhan’s technocratic determinism

McLuhan has been described by his critics as an essentialist (i.e. ascribing particular innate characteristics to particular media), and as a technological determinist and reductionist. Equally, by his fans he has been hailed as a visionary futurist leading the way to an age of electronic enlightenment. McLuhan remains as ambiguous today as the labels that have been foisted upon him. After a verbal critique by an eminent American sociologist McLuhan famously remarked: ‘You don’t like those ideas? I got others.’ McLuhan did not have a problem with ambiguity, inconsistency or non-closure. His writings and oral declarations are like streams of consciousness, often tangential, sometimes irrational; at times both mystical and mystifying.

Hot and cool

McLuhan provides us with a number of ‘tools’ for analysis. In chapter two of Understanding Media McLuhan writes:

There is a basic principle that distinguishes a hot medium like radio from a cool one like the telephone, or a hot medium like the movie from a cool one like TV. […] A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in ‘high definition’. High definition is the state of being well filled with data.1

At first glance this may appear straightforward. The quality of sound reproduction in radio is of a higher definition than that of the phone, and cinematic film is still of higher resolution than television. However, already there is a discrepancy: cinema (film) is ‘hot’, yet it extends more than one sense. When we think of something as ‘hot’ we would associate this with being engaged by it, yet for McLuhan it is ‘cool’ media that require high participatory involvement from their spectator: ‘…hot media do not leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience.’ Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience. We might intuitively associate TV (cool) more with passive consumption than cinema. To see a film (hot) we need to go out, buy a ticket, perhaps meet a friend, whereas with TV we merely flick a switch in our living room. However, as we watch a movie in a cinema the event is fixed: we are unable to alter the sequence of scenes or anything else about it. With television we have much more control and scope for participation, we are able to switch channels, make recordings, and thus replay things, we can make comments to other people who might be watching with us; also we can ignore it, something we are unlikely to do in a cinema. In this sense TV is more interactive than cinema.

90  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

The above quotations are about as much as McLuhan provides by way of defining ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ but right through his writing the terms come up in a wide variety of contexts and he provides many examples. A photograph is visually ‘high-definition’, thus ‘hot’, as opposed to a hand-drawn cartoon, which provides very little in the way of visual information. A lecture – ideally, a well-prepared, steady and controlled flow of information – is ‘hot’, thus easily consumed (even though many of my students may think otherwise!). A conversation is an unrehearsed, impromptu verbal manifestation, therefore it is ‘cool’ since we need to work hard to draw out its meaning. Prose is ‘hot’, easily grasped, whereas poetry demands more interpretation and thus is ‘cool’. Interestingly enough McLuhan classes ideograms and hieroglyphs – which to my mind contain more visual information than the abstracted forms of the alphabet – as ‘cool’. He describes the alphabet as a ‘hot and explosive medium’.2 This is because when the alphabetic code is mastered it allows for an uninterrupted flow of data transmission. Unlike engaging with hieroglyphic representations or illuminated manuscripts, it requires a more active form of interpretation. The ‘hot and cool’ notion has been rejected as no longer applicable. Television, for example, is no longer the low-resolution, black and white, lo-fidelity medium as when McLuhan first described it. It acquired colour, then it went digital, with surround-sound and wide screen. With the current trend in home cinemas, television is continuing to get ‘hotter’, and, contrary to McLuhan’s above ‘definition’, as it grows ‘hotter’ it becomes ever more interactive. Equally the medium of print has been cooling down. Magazines

Table 1  Hot and Cool. HOT

COOL

(low in participation) Radio Cinema Photographs Prose Printed word Lecture Alphabet Pop music Elvis Presley George Bush

(high in participation) Telephone Television Cartoon Poetry Spoken word Seminar Hieroglyphs Classical music Mick Jagger Bill Clinton

are ‘cooler’ than books, as they mix text and images and thus interrupt the steady transmission of alphabetic data. ‘Hot’ and ‘cool’ can be applied to all cultural forms, not just media, but then for McLuhan there is very little that is not media. The ‘hot’/‘cool’ thermometer is not the clear analytical tool that perhaps we would like it to be. It does not provide scientifically-measured data. It is an intuitive probe that works best, as Paul Levinson3 points out, when applied to two things that are attempting to do the same. At best ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ express a differential between two cultural forms, but are never an absolute measure. Like all of McLuhan’s writings, this proposition of taking the temperature of cultural forms, is merely an attempt to propel us into a new way of understanding media and their impact upon us.

‘Light-on’ and ‘light-through’

It was Baudrillard who took this screen metaphor further when he proposed that: ‘Today we live in the imaginary world of the screen […] All our machines are screens. We too have become screens, and the interactivity of men has become the interactivity

The Digital Image and the Pleasure Principle  91

A similar intuitive notion is that of ‘light-on’ and ‘light-through’. ‘Light-on’ media operate by bouncing light off an object; the light then subsequently hits our eyes. Anything projected would come under this category (e.g. cinema is a ‘light-on’ medium). In cinema the screen is in front of us, the light source behind us. With ‘light-through’ media the light source is in front of us, and, rather than projecting the light upon a screen, it is projected upon the viewer. It is the viewer who becomes the screen. Whereas ‘light-on’ media are bright and all revealing – thus ‘hot’ – ‘light-through’ media are mysterious, seductive and ‘cool’. McLuhan likens ‘light-through’ media to stained glass cathedral windows, suggesting a space beyond and beckoning us to investigate further. A ‘light-through’ medium draws us into a symbiotic relationship. Television is a ‘lightthrough’ medium and so is the computer screen.

of screens.’4 Baudrillard does not share McLuhan’s optimism about our electronic age, but interprets digital communications as symptomatic of an ‘implosion’ of the social.

The screen and its content

McLuhan also contemplates media content in a structural way: the content of each new medium, he observes, is another previous medium. For example, the content of TV is the medium of cinema (film, documentary, news); the content of cinema is the printed medium (novel, narrative, script): the content of print is writing; the content of writing is speech: the content of speech is thought; and finally the content of thought is human experience. The digital environment is the latest packaging for all the media that have gone before. The computer allows for the ‘remediation’ of all previous media.5 The computer screen may be a ‘light-through’, thus ‘cool’, medium, but, as it contains all previous media, its content ranges in temperature. In the digital environment we find text (hot) next to ‘cooler’ graphic icons; line drawings (cool) next to high-resolution photographs, or 3D models, movies and music, which are all classified as ‘hot’. Lev Manovich says with regard to this: The concept of the screen combines two distinct pictorial conventions – the older Western tradition of pictorial illusionism in which a screen functions as a window into a virtual space, something for the viewer to look into but not act upon; and the more recent convention of graphical human-computer interfaces that divides the computer screen into a set of controls […] As a result the computer screen becomes a battlefield for a number of incompatible definitions – depth and surface, opaqueness and transparency, image as illusionary space and image as instrument for action.6

92  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

The screen operates then in two conflicting modes, often simultaneously. The user shifts from non-participatory mode when contemplating an image, into a participatory mode when operating tools for action. The screen is an oscillating environment with the potential to make its user oscillate between perception and action, other and self, narrative and abstraction, text and image, ‘hot’ and ‘cool’.

Consuming the digital as an extension of the social

McLuhan felt that debates regarding media programming and specific content were actually diverting attention away from the structural impact that new forms of media have. ‘The medium is the message/massage/mass age etc.’ is a warning to this effect. However, McLuhan never advocated that the content of media should be ignored or was unimportant. He was just not very interested in debates that are often driven from moral perspectives and are thus polarised and providing no new insights. As stated previously, when we peel away the layers of media we ultimately end up with human experience; this alone would warrant it as an area for study. Further to that, the digital domain is increasingly involved in the social dynamics of our lives. E-mail, chat rooms, weblogging, online special interest groups and online interactive environments – all these contribute to new ways of building social networks and they provide creative platforms for self-expression. The survey conducted amongst my students shows a continuing trend for using digital technology as an extension of the

Fig. 1  Online wedding in Ultima Online.

Fig. 2  Virtual commemoration site after London bombing.

social sphere. Online relationships are increasingly the continuation of offline ones. People join online gaming sites, but often with offline friends. They will visit chat rooms, but then chat to people they met offline. So despite Baudrillard’s rejection of digital interactions as simulated, machine-like, and inauthentic, most people seem to like them.7

Replication of the social in the cultural, and the ‘effects model’

Many media debates appear at their core to be founded on what might in broad terms be called an ‘effects theory’, e.g. portraying violence in media will ultimately make people behave in a more violent fashion. Much research has been conducted in this area in Britain and the United States, although little has been found to support the theory.

Gerbner does support the notion that the screen representations of gender, ethnic identity, and power relationships are factors in the construction of actual identities in real life. In other words, to some extent people model themselves on what they see portrayed in the media. However, what is portrayed in the media is built from the social values, attitudes and beliefs that are manifest throughout our culture, in our everyday face-to-face interactions, economic exchanges, legal and educational institutions, artistic production and so on.

The Digital Image and the Pleasure Principle  93

In the United States, George Gerbner has been coordinating a study on television for nearly thirty years: the longest-running investigation into the dynamic relationship between television and its viewers.8 Gerbner did find that people’s perception of the world is affected by what they see on television. For example, what he calls ‘heavy viewers’ of television appear to perceive the world as a place more violent than it actually is. This might well have a bearing on how such people behave and the judgements and choices they make. However, there is no reason to conclude that these people will behave more violently.

Fig. 3  The Sims.

94  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

Equally, research conducted into online game-play would seem to indicate that this has a formative effect upon the perception of social relationships (e.g. some ‘heavy’ gamers stated that their online relationships were of more importance than their offline ones).9 Perhaps this should be of concern as in these cases the simulated fantasy identity has taken precedence over the actual real-world one. However, the question here is whether this is the consequence of a deeper problem, such as a lack of satisfaction with reallife social relationships, rather than the product of a specific technological form that facilitates this displacement. We need to be cautious, then, not to read too much into these studies, many of which contradict one another.10 Even Gerbner’s study, which appears well-funded and long term, does not paint a clear picture with regard to the long term effects of media consumption on social behaviour.11 The relationship between human behaviour and the representation of it in the digital environment is no doubt complex, and like a ‘chicken and egg’ conundrum. Most programmatic decisions with regard to the content of media are made according to market forces. Here we are confronted with a similar cause or effect question: are producers of media products actually creating new markets or merely responding to ones that are – at least potentially – already present? Again there is a complex dynamic relationship between our social and our cultural forms. To give two extreme examples: Grand Theft Auto is the most successful digital game ever. It sells in millions, mainly to men in their early twenties. The game depicts a marginal world of casinos, clubs, hookers, fast moving vehicles, violence, drugs and weapons. The player is free to behave in any fashion imaginable. You can kill cops, have sex with prostitutes, distribute porn, deal drugs, engage in street fights and be killed. Equally – as

Fig. 4  Grand Theft Auto.

the producers of the game point out – you can do none of these and behave in a lawabiding fashion. In either case the game constructs a hyper-masculine environment with a value system that awards competitive and aggressive behaviour. Pressure groups, on both sides of the political spectrum, would like to see GTA banned. However, banning products like this amounts to a symptomatic approach. The representations of violence, gender behaviour and ethnic identity in videogames can only be understood in the context of other representations in other social and media discourses such as news reports, books, magazines, advertising, music video, film and so on.12

The debate as to whether or not these games corrupt our children will no doubt rage on. The real question is: What do these representational forms tell us about our culture and ourselves? Why are these marginal narratives the fascination of the mainstream?

The screen as a mirror

Sherry Turkle describes one obvious but significant difference between television and videogames.14 ‘TV is something you watch. Videogames are something you do…’ Players of digital games think of them more in terms of ‘sports, sex or meditation’.

The Digital Image and the Pleasure Principle  95

Another game, particularly popular with females, is The Sims. The Sims started as a virtual, electronic doll’s house in which everything is customisable: the furniture, the wallpaper and the characters. The main pull of the game is the nurturing of the characters and the building of social relationships. Subsequent editions and extensions of the game have taken this in a much more adult direction. It is interesting how both the advertising and the user comments position the virtual and the real world. Though seen as distinct, they also inform one another. The virtual world is seen as a place for the pursuit of fantasies, yet it is also used as a testing ground for the real world.13

As we might anticipate from the ‘cool’ characteristics of the digital medium, the consumption of digital images is an active rather than a passive process. With videogames there is a distinct sense of identification with the events on the screen. In first person games (of which PacMan is an early example) players describe a merge with the character. As one player put it: ‘You become PacMan’. To put it more formally: the digital environment is different from both the fixity of the cinematic and the more interactive medium of television, in that it provides the user with an intimate sense of control, linked to a direct projection on, and attachment to, a point of spatial identity. In addition the resolution of the digital image has improved so dramatically that it now competes with (Malevich suggests surpasses) the media of film and television. Computer gaming has been a significant push factor in this. One reason why VR, as a consumer product, has not seen the growth initially anticipated, is that manufacturers of games have focused on developing the highest possible realism in 2D, something the market obviously approved of. But, aside from high interaction and realistic graphics, what makes playing these games so interesting? Taking a psychoanalytic approach, playing games can be understood as a symbolic activity that attempts to fulfil needs that are not met elsewhere in our lives. From a Jungian perspective, games provide an outlet for the archetypal forces within the collective unconscious. On screen we can safely place ourselves in the role of the Hero, explore Animus or Anima, or behave like our shadow.

96  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

Alternatively, in a Freudian sense, games are a means for enacting the Oedipus complex. Jacques Lacan proposes that in the early years of our lives we make a shift from the real – associated with nature, the physical and the mother, who takes care of us and meets all our needs – to the symbolic, which is associated with culture, the social and the father.15 It is not possible to do justice to Lacan in the scope of this article. Rather I refer to Laura Mulvey16 who applied Lacan to film and Judith Williamson17 who did the same but to advertising. In both cases Lacan’s shift from the realm of the real to the symbolic and the formation of the imaginary during the mirror stage is understood as setting up a tension, which plays itself out during the rest of our lives.

Fig. 5  The Sims identity kit.

Fig. 6  Everquest.

According to Lacan we never recover from the imposed socialisation process. Having to leave our primordial state of wholeness, by being forced to submit to the ‘Law of the Father’, induces a psychological drive, an underlying structural principle in our lives. Forever we attempt to regain the comfort, pleasure and wholeness of the womb. We want to return to the realm of the all-caring all-embracing mother; whereas we want to escape from, rebel against and even destroy, the realm of the controlling and lawprescribing father. Lacan is building here on Freud’s theories of the pleasure principle and the Oedipus complex. Blind to the fact that it will never regain the primordial unity this drive pushes us to oscillate between the imaginary and the symbolic. Digital environments allow us a means to play out this desire. They provide a route for returning to the symbiotic mother/child existence. In these worlds we can feel a sense of complete control and god-like power. Games like The Sims allow users to create and experiment with new identities and so pursue the primordial self-image. The realistic forms of these interactive digital environments thus start to function as mirrors, which can be controlled and manipulated.

The reason we consume these realistic representations then is exactly because they are not real but simulations of potentially real events. The oscillation of the viewer between Manovich’s two screen modes, could be understood as an oscillation between the imaginary (contemplative) and symbolic (active). It is not surprising that living in the digital environment can become extremely addictive. The ‘cool’ interactive screen allows for an extension of our social selves and it provides a highly interactive and controllable mirror for the never ending quest of our irretrievable ideal self-image; equally it is a means for rebellion against the limits imposed upon us by our culture and a means for attempting to fulfil our deepest innermost desire: to return to the womb.

The Digital Image and the Pleasure Principle  97

Shooter games like Doom and Grand Theft Auto provide a means for rebellion against the Law of the Father. Here it is possible to violently reject the Law of the Father, without the actual consequences that real life violent action might bring.

Notes   1. McLuhan, M. (2001) [1964], Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, London: Routledge, p. 24.   2. McLuhan, M. (2001) [1964], Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, London: Routledge, p. 24.   3. Levinson, P. (1999), Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium, London, Routledge, p. 100.   4.  Baudrillard, J. (1988), Xerox & Infinity. London: Touchepas/Agitac.

  5. Bolter, J., Grusin, R. (1999), Remediation: Understanding New Media, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, p. 19.   6. Manovich, L. (2001), The Language of New Media, Cambridge, Mass.; London, MIT Press, p.90. A fair appraisal of Manovich’s book can be found at www.imageandnarrative.be/ mediumtheory/janvanlooy.htm (active 28 May 2008).   7. Some of my students claim to send 100–150 text messages each week, others claim to surf in excess of 50 hours a week or play games for up to 25 hours per week.

  8. Gerbner, G. (2002), The Electronic Storyteller: Television and the Cultivation of Values, produced by Sut Jhally, Media Education Foundation, USA.

  9. Kolo, C., Baurthe, T. (2004), ‘Living a Virtual Life: Social Dynamics of Online Gaming’, Game Studies, The International Journal of Computer Game Research, volume 4, issue 1, November. www.gamestudies.org/0401/kolo/ (active 28 May 2008). 10. There are many reasons why these studies might be flawed; e.g. lack of funding, ideological bias, inappropriate research methodology. For an in-depth discussion of the problems with the ‘media effects model’ see: Gauntlett, D. (2002), Media Gender and Identity: An introduction, London: Routledge. Or his website www.theory.org.uk/david/effects.htm (active 28 May 2008).

11. My own survey carried out amongst digital game players shows a distinct disregard for this ‘effects’ model, e.g. few of my students believe that playing aggressive video- games will lead to an increase in aggressive ‘real-life’ behaviour.

98  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

12. Alloway, N., Gilbert, P. (1998), ‘Video Game Culture: Playing with Masculinity, Violence and Pleasure’, Wired-up: young people and the electronic media, edited by Howard, S., London: Routledge, p. 97.

13. One Sims player commented: ‘It’s very constructive – it makes you really think about your real-life world. You look at the mess in your room and realise it affects your happiness, even if in some slight way that you might not normally notice. You start to get hungry and realise your energy is fading and that you’re getting a bit more grumpy, something you might not have noticed otherwise! I know many Sims-fans that find their real life world improves as they become more aware of these sorts of things.’ From: www.bellaonline.com/articles/ art5413.asp (active 28 May 2008). 14. Turkle, S. (2003), ‘Video Games and Computer Holding Power’, The New Media Reader, edited by Wardrip-Fruin, N., Montfort, N., Cambridge, Mass.; London : MIT Press. 15. Lacan, J. (1966), ‘The Mirror Stage’, in Ecrits; a selection, translated by Sheridan, A., London: Tavistock, 1977, p. 4.

16. Mulvey, L. (1975), ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,, originally published in Screen 16.3 Autumn, pp. 6–18. Available at www.jahsonic.com/VPNC.html (active 28 May 2008).

17. Williamson, J. (1978), Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising, London: Boyars, p. 60–65.

Digital Archive

Digital Archiving as an Art Practice Dew Harrison

The idea of archiving as a form of practice within the field of art is not a new one. It has been an accepted activity since the mid 1960s and in evidence in the early twentieth century. The collages and photomontages of the 1920s, although not intended as artworks but more as purveyors of social meaning, had an aesthetic, through being both pictorial and semantically structured, which had a strong impact on later archival works. Benjamin Buchloh dismisses the influences of the earlier archives – ‘such projects share a condition of being unclassifiable within the typology and terminology of avantgarde art history’. He claims that ‘avant-garde history seems to have few, if any, precedents for artistic procedures that systematically organise knowledge as didactic models of display or as mnemonic devices’.1 However, it is not unusual for artists to look beyond their field for both material and content within their practice, and this was particularly so in the 1960s when artists were trapped within the confines of modernist ideology concerning the autonomy of art, and began engaging with the outside world. Jeremy Deller’s current ‘Folk Archive’ is a clear example of a contemporary practice resting on earlier methods of archiving for social engagement and response. Initial influences can be traced to Walter Benjamin and Aby Warburg. Benjamin’s Passagenwerk was a textual assemblage created in the late 1920s. This unfinished montage was an attempt to construct an analytical memory of collective experience in nineteenth century Paris. Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas (1927–29) was a monumental project, aiming to construct a model of western European humanist culture from classical antiquity onwards. Warburg’s work is text-free and consists of over 60 panels containing 1,000 photographs in an attempt, according to Kurt Forster, to ‘redefine graphic montage as the construction of meanings rather than the arrangement of form’ in a similar way to the work of Schwitters and Lissitsky.2 These two archives existed in parallel with the more politically-charged works of Weimar Dadaists such as Heartfield, Hocke and Rodchenko and the Surrealists, whose montage techniques were known to Benjamin, and whose collages were a random juxtaposition of found objects and images with a sense of fundamental cognitive and perceptual anomic. The Surrealists’ work was later read as apolitical and anti-communicative, esoteric and aestheticist, resulting in a call for work with a dimension of narrative and instrumentalised logic within the structured organisation of the montage aesthetic. These earlier archives were largely facilitated by new technological developments in print and photography, the latter identified by Benjamin as an emerging emancipatory technology containing the social promise of enabling collective interaction and subjecthood.3 Indeed Warburg conceived his Atlas as a model of the construction of social memory. Throughout the mid 1960s structurally-similar photographic projects began to emerge in Europe from the accumulation of found or intentionally-produced

photographs set in grid formations which were neither collage nor photomontage, not mere collections but artworks. Although the German artist Gerhard Richter states that it was Rauschenberg’s collage aesthetic rather than the Weimar Dadaists or Warburg that introduced him to the photomontage practice,4 his ongoing Atlas project, begun in 1962, constitutes a massive repository of pictorial source material with motifs arranged by content and form rather than in chronological order. Richter states that ‘My Atlas is a deluge of images that I can control only by organising them and with no individual images left at all.’5 According to Helmut Friedel ‘The breadth of ideas and sheer variety of forms and meanings the Atlas embodies is astonishing’.6 The archive is evidence of the thinking that underlies Richter’s paintings and he ensures that every time the Atlas is exhibited it is in compliance with his strict instructions for hanging, so that it is displayed differently each time.

102  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

The upheaval of conceptual art towards the end of the modernist period gave rise to an understanding of the organised archive as systemised collation and enabled new working methods for artists. The engagement of conceptual artists with systems theory, information theory, cybernetics and electronic technology had a real bearing on the ideological, political and social conflicts throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Hans Haacke’s interest in systems thinking concerned the structure of organisations and social systems. This led to his most controversial work Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971. This project held a massive collation of data including two maps, 142 photographs, 142 typewritten sheets, an explanatory sheet and six charts showing the complexity of connections between Shapolsky’s companies and his subsequent business machinations. The American artist Mary Kelly gives us another example of systemised collation in her obsessive record of the early development of a feminist’s son in a patriarchal society. Her Post-Partum Document (1973–79) is a six-sectioned, 135-part, multimedia documentation of the first six years in this mother-child relationship. The need to engage with social systems caused a general movement out of the studio and into the streets. This gave rise to a critique of the encounter between galleries, museums and conceptual art which resulted in interrogations of museology and the institutional archive. Informed by André Malraux’s idea of ‘le musée imaginaire’, the museum without walls, where he anticipated that the reduction of historical context and social function would leave a purely aesthetic experience, Marcel Broodthaers showed his Musée d’Art Modern, Département des Aigles at ‘Documenta V’ in 1972. This was an eclectic range of objects, photographs, books and films begun in 1968, representing the eagle and the complex cultural myths surrounding the bird as a symbol for a nation, of fortitude, of perception, of strength and power. This work was a second order representation of a classification system at work and deconstructed the museum with wit and humour saving the archive from seriousness by verging on the arbitrary. The French artist Christian Boltanski continues to use the museum archive structure for his mixed-media installations. However, in order to create mementos of ‘fictive’ identities using collections of poor-quality family photos in order to intimate a common bourgeois life, his installations may include biscuit tins and other household items. An example of such is his Reserve of the Dead Swiss (1990), a cabinet-like tower of tin boxes, each with a photograph of an anonymous person, piles of fabric and lamps.

This work evokes the Holocaust as successfully as any museum exhibit but with false evidence. From the examples of archival activities within art practice given above, two forms of artwork are prominent and still have resonance within contemporary practice: n Collective memory/memorial (A contemporary example of this work is Winifred Agricola de Cologne’s vast multimedia ‘Virtual Memorial’ project at www.a-virtualmemorial.org (Accessed 5 April 2007)); n Museological methods (Contemporary examples of this work are Susan Hiller’s Freud Museum, or Damien Hirst’s cabinets of medical instruments and sea shells). Having given some insight into these two reasons for archiving we will now explore a third, ‘complexity’ which, in contemporary practice, may now embrace new technologies beyond photography for reportage and documentation: n Complexity management – or the collation of separate elements in order to make sense of a whole body of work as an ‘holisitic gestalt’ for analysis, interrogation and meaning (Christopher Williams, Art & Language).

Brasil features the smiling faces of five multi-ethnic models along with a number of hats. The eight hats are each labelled with a different country name, referring to the Amnesty list. The image may be interpreted as a global map matching consumption with repression. Williams used this list of countries to inform his botanical mapping of the world and generated a group of eight flower species, one for each hat. The flowers were arranged in a loose bouquet laid across a white damask cloth and photographed. This photograph, in colour, was hung on an installed section of wall. The piece also incorporates a monochrome print of the archives maintained by the Getty Center for the History of Art and Humanities. The aura of institutional morbidity shifts to one

Digital Archiving as an Art Practice  103

In 1991 Christopher Williams exhibited a highly complex installation entitled Bouquet, for Bas Jan Ader and Christopher D’Arcangelo, a piece which combines sentiment with the almost clinical objectivity apparent in past conceptual artworks. The work not only pays homage to the two conceptual artists mentioned in the title, but also refers to humanitarian feelings for the world’s injustice and to personal loss. Williams is interested in how photographs influence our reality, and his central subject matter has long been the archive; the intersection between photographic trace, knowledge and power. Bouquet is a continuation of a previous piece entitled Angola to Vietnam (1989). The topic is political murder and involves the viewer in an analysis of information and power. Angola to Vietnam consists of 27 photographs of plants taken from the Harvard University collection of glass replicas of botanical specimens. These glass flowers have their own history, not divulged in the botanical and photographic information that accompanies the black and white photographs. Each plant pictured represents a country named in the 1985 Amnesty International Report. This report documents countries where political disappearances have taken place. The piece draws an analogy between the fragile and irreplaceable glass flowers and the human victims of torture and abuse on behalf of whom Amnesty campaigns. The strict symmetry of the images and text is broken by a single image entitled Brasil, an image also used for the front cover of the French magazine, Elle.

of actual human loss through the dedication of the installation to the two conceptual artists who took their own lives. The references within Bouquet to the work of Bas Jan Ader and Christopher D’Arcangelo are numerous.7 Hans Haacke and his Shapolsky et al project is another fine example of a piece held together by an interlacing of complicated cross-referencing. More complex and literal cross-referencing may be witnessed in the Indexes of Art & Language (1972– 74). The Art & Language collective was foremost among those who established the theoretical conditions of conceptual art and their Indexes are systems concerning art as philosophy, structured through language. The materials they processed were the terms and conditions of their own conversations and arguments and their intention was to analyse the internal intellectual structures and relations of Art & Language. The ultimate aim was to produce a system in which decisions were taken (often represented diagrammatically) concerning the connectivity there might be between various texts. The Documenta V Index of 1972 took the form of a filing system holding an index of over 350 text items previously published and circulated by Art & Language members. Each item was read in relation to the others resulting in 122,500 cross-references. The walls surrounding the filing cabinets were papered with the listed index of texts, interrelated according to three possible categories: n a relation of compatibility = orthodox (Art & Language) n a relation of incompatibility = unorthodox n a relation of incomparability = relatively eccentric

104  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

The work is an attempt to map a conversation, to find a representation of a place where meanings could be made. The research-like character of Art & Language could be presented in the gallery context only in token form and it was accepted that the hiatus between ‘research-like’ activity and artistic presentation had been successfully resolved in this particular Index. How much easier this would have been using the hypertext systems being developed in parallel to the Indexes in the realm of information technology. Art and technology, being largely concerned with visually aesthetic experimentation in the 1950s and 1960s, was anathema to hardcore conceptualists. The conceptualists acknowledged Duchamp’s intent of establishing the artist as intellectual rather than skilled craftsman, where the value of the idea predominated over the visual engagement with the art object. Art & Language had little or no interest in hardware and software as tools of production. Charles Harrison, the critic, art historian and prominent articulator of Art & Language, made this quite clear by stating that the ‘legacies of Pop-Art-andTechnology were never a part of the Art & Language agenda’.8 Without employing hypermedia technology further indexing could still take forms other than printed texts and filing cabinets. The Indexes were understood as a means of ‘mapping’ to represent relations within the conversational world of Art & Language itself, the goal of Art & Language being to map the vast territory of modern culture with art at its core, ‘even though a conceptual definition, in the sense of being able to reveal or show the essence of art seemed destined to fail, a map of the relationships, devices and situation in which art unfolded nevertheless seemed plausible’.9

Art & Language were aware of research outside the art field into similar areas of mapping memory and narrative forms. According to Harrison: Analogues for the indexing project are to be found along the borderline between the study of Artificial Intelligence and the theorisation of mind and memory which has enlarged into a distinct field of research since the 1970s. In typical work in this field, forms of knowledge are represented in terms of such devices as ‘semantic nets’ and ‘frames’ – which are a kind of index.10

The later forms of indexing, made as self-referential conceptual maps from the 1970s to the present include paintings with text such as the Hostage and Incidents in a Museum series, multimedia constructions such as Mother, Father, Monday (2001–2). This is a tabletop arrangement composed of juxtaposed texts from Art & Language conversations and interviews printed onto different-sized, rectangular pieces of coloured canvas. An integral part of the ongoing interrogation of art by Art & Language deals with its specified mediums. Although they began by articulating this with language and text, Art & Language have had to come to terms with, and so return to, painting. More recently it has become necessary for them to engage with digital media. Their methods of indexing and archiving in order to make sense of their discourse have now brought them into the range of digital technologies and they have produced a DVD in order to enable a comprehensive totality of their work to date. Art & Language have produced an archive of their body of work in one format – a DVD. This idea of self-archiving a body of work for critical examination in order to further an artist’s own understanding and practice is not a new one. Evidence of a similar but less methodical activity was apparent at a much earlier date, for example in the Large Glass of Marcel Duchamp, constructed between 1915 and 1923 but left as an incomplete project together with its accompanying collection of notes, drawings, diagrams and pictures in ‘green and white boxes’.11 Duchamp took a more obvious approach to self-archiving with his miniature portable museum, the Boîte-en-valisé described by Thierry de Duve as ‘a monograph of Duchamp’s oeuvre in its totality’.12 However, the Large Glass may be understood as the culmination of his earlier work, informed by his previous ideas. In turn, the Large Glass informed his final work Étant Donnés. According to Octavio Paz ‘Everything Duchamp has done is summed up in the Large Glass, which was finally unfinished in 1923.’13 Digital Archiving as an Art Practice  105

The bride and her bachelors depicted in the Large Glass have their own narrative contained by the elements seen within the upright glass plates, but they also refer to other issues: relations between female and male; culture and technology; and the condition of the art object. The subject of the piece is the machinery of sexual desire but this is difficult to understand if the Large Glass is viewed in isolation. Only by following Duchamp’s notes are the stages of the erotic encounter between the bride and the bachelors made apparent. The work is a balanced combination of verbal and visual concepts to be approached with humour, in the comic spirit intended by this ‘hilarious picture’. The notes in the ‘boxes’ are not clear instructions or explanations of the Large Glass and are often opaque and indecipherable. Some, however, are fairly stable descriptions, such as the identifiable objects that populate the picture space. These confusing depictions together with the ‘boxes’ of notes are densely interrelated and cross-referenced into a work which always remains open to interpretation.

106  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

Fig. 1  Dew Harrison, StarGlass. 2000. © Dew Harrison.

Within my own research, to achieve a closer understanding of the origins of conceptual art, I undertook a re-reading of Duchamp, by attempting to cross-reference his ideas and outcomes into a semantic multimedia web of his mind. The work StarGlass is an outcome of this research (Fig. 1). It is a hypermedia system of the Large Glass, interconnected through the semantic associations between itself and the notes from the ‘boxes’ together with Duchamp’s other works: the paintings, objects, ‘readymades’, texts and interviews informing and surrounding it. The transposition of his work into digital multimedia form achieved a unification enabling it to be seen at once as a single piece, hypermedia being a useful structuring and cross-referencing tool for managing complexity. Looking back it is evident that what was actually created through this transposition into a new technological form was an archive of Duchamp’s thoughts, works and ideas, enabling new understandings. This unification of ideas could not have been achieved with the technology available at the time it was created. In a similar exercise to that carried out by the Art & Language DVD, my archive used a digital format to exemplify the cross-referencing that holds a body of work together. Another form of digital contemporary art archive is evidenced in a curatorial activity undertaken in 2001. Around 200 artworks were displayed in an online exhibition at the Watershed Media Centre, Bristol, entitled ‘Net_Working’.14 This activity may also be understood as practice rather than curation. A theme was set and artists were invited to contribute in order for the curator to interlink their separate works into a whole, in this case an exhibition. Previous to this, within my Duchampian research, I had used similar methods to produce a piece called 4D Duchamp where 25 artists were selected to create a website in response to one of the identified items in the Large Glass. These websites were then interlinked into a complete holistic version of the piece. The Net_Working exhibition remains on its dedicated server hosted by the Watershed and stands as a collation of born digital work from all over the globe. It is a testament to the variety of approaches to using new media at that time. The exhibition shows early work by artists who are now well-known internationally. The screen-based interface to these works

was problematic in that methods of categorising data and the organisation of metadata had to be devised for accessibility by the end user, the exhibition viewer. Such activity is paralleled with database design and is now proving useful in informing a number of projects currently being researched at the University of Wolverhampton. ‘Archiving the LabCulture sessions: a new form of database for the arts and academic community’, is a further example of explorations into the digital archiving of digital artworks, this time not a curated exhibition but a ready-made archive transposed into an online database accessible from a website. The archived LabCulture sessions will be readily available for analysis and critical investigation to further identify and inform contemporary practice. The archive will contain outcomes of week-long MediaLab residencies run by PVA MediaLab, a UK artist-led arts organisation registered under LabCulture Ltd. This organisation has been running such events for up to ten artists at a time for almost as many years. The archived works cover a variety of practices (social engagement, painting, writing, performance, sound etc.), from artists at different ages and stages in their careers. Many are well known in the United Kingdom and internationally. The unifying and unique factor is that the works constitute a set of new media experiments conducted in the same lab conditions (although the technical equipment may vary in that it is tailored to the artists’ ‘proposal’ needs e.g. PVA ran a sonic LabCulture session at the Roundhouse in London in 2005). Within a Lab residency the selected artists live and work together with five artist-facilitators to further ideas in new media technology which they may or may not have used before. For these events PVA partners host organisations from all over the United Kingdom and have now moved into the international circuit with a Lab in Singapore in July 2005 and another in Croatia in spring 2006.

The international archiving workshop held in Hong Kong in 2004 by the Asian Art Archive was testament to the current ubiquity of the archive. Its application ranges from the institutional to the personal and encompasses the ongoing understanding of, for example, archiving as live art, and in particular the digital database archive. According to Lev Manovich the idea of collating and storing has been accelerating in tandem with the rise of the Internet and the use of multimedia desktop PCs – ‘The rise of the Web, this gigantic and always changing data corpus, gave millions of people a new hobby or profession: data indexing. There is hardly a Web site which does not feature at least a dozen links to other sites, therefore every site is a type of database.’15 The idea of personal archiving is embedded in our present culture now that it can be

Digital Archiving as an Art Practice  107

The database is rapidly becoming the new archival form for holding a body of artwork up for critique and response. The conceptual art of the mid-twentieth century, a practice placed within a period of major international political events alongside technological and communication innovations, set the foundations for today’s global society. It has now evolved into an art practice where the development of a more culturally, socially and politically responsive art has become paramount. From the complexities of the contemporary conceptual artist’s breadth of content and highly-structured methods of presenting it, archiving has emerged and now engages with new digital tools for managing discourse and ideas – vast amounts of information and cross-referenced material.

supported electronically through continuing developments in technology. It is open to the common man, as accessible as stamp-collecting and as comfortable as the older technologies of print and photography to the present-day artist. Digital archiving is an activity which will continue to develop within current art practice but may be recognised as such only retrospectively for a while longer.

Notes   1.  Buchloh, B.H.D., (1999) ‘Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: The Anomic Archive’, October, 88, p. 118.

  2. Forster, K., (1991) ‘Die Hamburg Amerika Linie oder Warburg’s Kunstwissenschaft zwischen den Kontinenten’, Aby Warburg: Akten des Internationalen Symposiums, Bredekamp, H., Diers, M., and Schoell-Glass, C., (eds.), Weinhein: Acta Humaniora, pp. 11–37.

  3. Benjamin, W., (1931) ‘Short History of Photography’, Die Literarische Welt, 38, pp. 3–4; 39, pp. 3–4; 40, pp. 7–8.

  4. Richter, G., (1995) The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings and Interviews 1962–93, London: Thames and Hudson, pp. 132–140.   5. Richter, G., (1995) The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings and Interviews 1962–93, London: Thames and Hudson, p. 199.

  6. Friedel, F., (1997) ‘The Atlas 1962–1997’ in Gerhard Richter Atlas, London: Anthony d’Offay; New York: Marian Goodman, pp. 5–7.

  7. Crowe, T., (1996) Modern Art in the Common Culture, New Haven/London: Yale University Press, pp. 219–227.   8. Harrison, C., (2001) Essays on Art & Language, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 17.

  9. Cereceda, M., (2004) Art & Language in 10 Concepts, exhibition catalogue, CAC Malaga, p. 103.

10.  Harrison, C., (2001) Essays on Art & Language, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 72.

11. La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, meme, or The Bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even. 12.  de Duve, T., (1996) Kant After Duchamp, October, Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, p. 417.

108  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

13. Paz, O., (1978) Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare, London: Lund Humphries, p. 43. 14. The exhibiting of these works is covered fully in project 4 of ‘Digital Art (on) the Line’, Digital Art History: A Subject in Transition, Computers and the History of Art Series, Vol. 1, Bentkowska-Kafel, A., Cashen, T. and Gardiner, H., (eds), Bristol UK: Intellect. pp. 69–74. The exhibition may be viewed at: www.dshed.net/networking (active 30th May 2008). 15. Manovich, L., Database as Symbolic Form. http://www.manovich.net (active 30th May 2008).

Preservation of Net Art in Museums Anne Laforet

Artists appropriated the Internet as soon as it became public, developing new artistic, social and technical practices that are now referred to collectively as Net art. Museums and cultural institutions that are interested in such works have had to reconsider the way that they commission, exhibit, collect and preserve artworks, just as they have done for other forms of ephemeral or process-based art. Within the museum, the balance between documentation and preservation is shifting in favour of documentation, as many contemporary artworks do not have a fixed or stable form but exist in multiple states. A rich, diverse and precise documentation is crucial in order to support preservation strategies that envisage artworks as being variable, mutable and not static. New or updated preservation models need to be explored. Beginning with an overview of current models being researched and implemented (especially those within museums or national libraries), this paper will develop the idea of the archaeological museum as a potential solution to the problems inherent in Net art preservation. Net art preservation may be seen as a paradox: How should the conservation of a living artistic practice in flux be approached? Preservation involves the care of objects and the transmission of values and concepts from yesterday or today to the future. It means that choices must be made and possible losses accepted. It entails future access to and exhibition of the objects and artworks. Current data storage capacities may give the illusion that the preservation of all human creations is possible, at least in the short term. Automatic data processing, without any human intervention, is being pursued by many, from archival institutions to commercial companies, as a means of preservation. However, effective preservation involves selection according to a set of defined criteria. Developing a specific long-term preservation strategy is not an easy task for museums even though most now have experience of preserving other ephemeral forms of artwork such as land art, performance or conceptual art. There are new questions to be addressed: on one hand, there are accepted preservation methods and practices, and on the other hand, specialised knowledge in the maintenance and preservation of digital content. The alliance of the two creates an exciting, and perilous, area for experimentation. As Julian Stallabrass pointed out in his book Internet Art. The Online Clash of Culture and Commerce:

there is a strong contrast between the unchanging character of digital artworks for those who hold to fixity as an ideal, and the reality of the process-led and temporary character of Internet art. The former is a dream of the immutability of the art object; the latter a visible manifestation and dramatisation of the condition of art even in the offline world, its original meanings changing, growing and eroding as its social, political and institutional framing shifts.1

The impossibility of maintaining an Internet-based artwork in an ‘original’ state (which may not even have existed) compels the institution to clarify what it desires to preserve and why, and what may be possible for it to preserve. The practical and conceptual question of how to delimit an online artwork is raised. A Net art piece may be in continual evolution, incorporating contributions by one or many persons to content derived from other websites (links, access to databases, webcams, audio, video streams, etc.). The perception of the boundaries between the works and their environment is far from easy to understand, even for the artists creating the work. This issue is also significant within the framework of intellectual property. An online artwork may be delimited only through a deep understanding of the original context of its creation, a context that should be preserved as far as possible for further research but also for presentation (through access to the work and its exhibition). For instance, if an institution acquires works that have a ‘parasitic’ relationship with other websites, such as pieces using data from search engines, or which create alternative visualisations of websites, for instance by using alternative browsers, should such works be exhibited with the websites and technologies available at the moment of creation or with the tools and content at the moment of actualisation? Both are valid but are of different significance.

110  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

Which elements of Net art works should be emphasised, described, documented and kept? What makes up the artwork? Its source code? The experience of the piece for the visitor? Preservation strategies and subsequent collections will vary, depending on how institutions answer this question. The balance within the museum seems to be shifting from preservation to documentation, owing to the make-up of these artworks, that is, the many software and hardware layers that are continually on the brink of obsolescence. These artworks do not have a fixed or stable form but progress through multiple states. These states need to be captured (using the term chosen by the Rotterdam-based centre for unstable media V2_). Alongside the context of the works, it is also important to document the process of their creation rather than simply focusing on one or many states or moments of the work. Documentation may also include contextual information, information about visitor interaction and how its interfaces are inhabited and explored. In this paper I focus on three approaches to preservation for museums and cultural institutions: first, when the museum model of preservation is promoted from inside the museum institution (the Variable Media2 paradigm); second, how institutions that embrace new media art from its inception to its presentation deal with traces of artistic practice (e.g. the V2_ archive3); and third, some initiatives from archival institutions and libraries in web archiving.

Within the museum context, Jon Ippolito, an artist, and a curator at the Guggenheim Museum, originated the approach known as Variable Media. This perceives the artwork outside its medium, so that it can evolve and be recreated, for instance when its original medium becomes obsolete. Every artwork is considered individually, more as a score than a finite, unchanging object. The variable media approach does not focus only on Net art, but also deals with every contemporary art form that puts an emphasis on process rather than on the object, such as, for example, conceptual art, land art, minimal art, installations and performance. When an artwork is acquired by the museum, its ‘behaviours’ are defined to describe it beyond its physicality. The artwork may be installed, performed, reproduced, duplicated, interactive, encoded, networked or contained. These terms go beyond a mere separation by medium or a simple opposition between analogue and digital. The acquisition is also the opportunity for a deep dialogue between the museum and the artist. Four preservation strategies have been highlighted: storage, migration, emulation, and reinterpretation. The artist is invited to choose one or more of these. This process demonstrates a significant change in the role of the artist within the museum. Storage, the default solution, consists of holding the artwork on digital media. There is, of course, the risk of losing the artwork if the storage media becomes obsolete. Migration implies an upgrade from one storage medium to another: that is converting a file to a new format or transferring it to a more recent version of the underlying software. One consequence of migration may be a change in the appearance of an artwork, for instance if some software functions are not continued from one version to another.

One of the main contributions to the Variable Media paradigm is the identification of the fourth strategy, reinterpretation. This means recreating the work each time it is actualised, faithful to the artist’s intentions although the artwork may be very different materially from its original form. The museum then has a more active role. ‘As outlandish as the idea may seem to traditional collecting practices, the Variable Media

Preservation of Net Art in Museums  111

Emulation recreates the appearance of a work. Preserving the hardware and software on which artworks have been created is not conceivable in the long term, but it is possible to emulate the original works. By installing the various software layers that have been preserved on a new system, it is possible to execute the artwork (original or modified files) to recreate it. It seems simpler and less expensive than migration because the level of intervention is not at file level but at operating system or hardware level (depending on the kind of emulation chosen). Such solutions may be developed by a network of institutions. Emulation works best for autonomous software; for Net art, one significant issue is the possibility of network emulation. This goes beyond emulating connection speed, to Internet protocols, server- and client-side software, and perhaps even the content of the Internet for some Net art projects. Despite the many developments in the emulation field, it is probable that not all elements of an online artwork may be preserved. Nevertheless, all preserved fragments are still very precious to museums.

Initiative offers an alternative for those whose conception of their work goes beyond its manifestation in a particular form. And it helps us imagine the museum as an incubator for living, changing artworks, rather than a mausoleum for dead ones.’4 Variable Media is not the only institutional framework for Net art preservation. ‘Archiving the Avant-Garde’,5 subtitled ‘Documenting and Preserving Digital/Variable Media Art’, is an initiative of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Associated with Variable Media and other structures, Archiving the Avant-Garde develops and tests models for notation, cataloguing, accession, and emulation within the museum environment. To deal with the challenge of preservation, some institutions choose to focus on documentation strategies. Such an institution is V2_, not a museum per se, but a centre devoted to unstable media art based in Rotterdam. The goal of the V2_ archive is to document the artworks and projects presented or produced at V2_, not to acquire and preserve them. However, it is not always possible to distinguish an online project from its documentation (a website and its archive could be similar or different depending on their code, their content and the way they are copied). Similarly, it is harder to distinguish data and metadata in an online environment (as they both may be embedded in the same code).

112  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

Instead of preservation, V2_ has chosen to use the term ‘capture’: ‘capturing means assembling all necessary information on a project and its subordinate aspects, structuring this information in such a way that it gives a good impression of the different manifestations of the project and keeping the resulting metadata blueprints of the electronic art activities accessible for future research.’6 In this way the V2_ initiative reflects the current shift from preservation towards documentation that is taking place within a number of cultural institutions, owing to the materiality of the artworks. Although the objectives and methods of museums and archives do differ, it is pertinent to look more closely at archival initiatives to preserve online materials. Many archives and libraries are currently pursuing web archiving, many through the framework of legal deposit, or in collecting websites from national domains. Owing to the high volumes of data to be captured (for instance a snapshot of the French domain contains around 120 billion files7), they usually focus on automatic archiving with the aid of webcrawler robots, while integrating metadata. Legal deposit in France has been expanded in order to include the Internet in its mission. The Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) intends to create snapshots of the French web at regular intervals, and plans also to gather Net art sites. The latter project is still at the conceptual stage but many issues have already arisen. For example, artworks captured through automatic tools may behave differently to the ‘original’ works, and may be captured without the knowledge of the artist(s), and without remuneration. Such matters are at the core of the differences between the museum and the library. The way the BNF resolves or does not resolve these issues will be an interesting focus for future research. To conclude, I would like to propose a hybrid model for the preservation of Net art using the metaphor of the archaeological museum. Archaeology is often concerned

with gathering fragments and reassembling objects, taking account of voids, gaps and missing parts. Through analysis, a plausible argument for the original object(s) may be put forward, while maintaining open alternative hypotheses. Viewers are made aware that what they are seeing and experiencing may be a reconstruction or interpretation of an original state. As Annick Bureaud, Nathalie Lafforgue and Joël Boutteville suggested in a study on new media for the French Ministry of Culture in 1996: ‘the art museum which receives unique items is certainly not the model for the conservation of electronic art, even if it can still fulfil this function on the fringe or open its premises to other forms of conservation. The archaeological museum, however, seems to be a more apposite example: it combines scholarly culture and everyday items ; it keeps “broken pieces” (equivalent to works which do not work as they should any more) that it can decipher; it deals with the repetition and accumulation of identical objects in different states which help towards the projected reconstitution of the original condition. Such “archaeology” is necessary in electronic art. Indeed, the works created by many pioneers in this field simply do not work any more or do not work properly, while some have simply vanished.’8

By emphasising the dialogue between Net artworks and their environment, an institution could become a living archive; a research space, with fragments of artworks that could be updated and re-activated in multiple ways. Ideally, it could take the form of a partnership of organisations involved in giving access to and preserving Internet art. Ad-hoc projects or long-term collaborations may easily be imagined: a cross-pollination of fragments, histories and stories. Current groupings of institutions in both the archive and museum communities as well as an increasing interest in inter-operability and complementarity might adumbrate such meta-institutions, and

Preservation of Net Art in Museums  113

This model seems an appropriate means to comprehend and deal with Net artworks and their contexts. Indeed, the Net art environment (online critical writing, annotated links, mailing lists, etc.) is not currently preserved by art museums as they concentrate on the artworks themselves, taking part, in spite of themselves, in the disappearance of the original context of the works. In contrast, automatic Net archiving takes into account the interrelational aspect of Net art; that is, its continuing evolution within a dynamic environment. Regular and automated indexing (which does not necessitate the active intervention of a person in charge of preservation) makes it possible to follow very closely the way artworks evolve. However, automatic recording does not necessarily mean that the works are functioning as they did at the time of their capture when they were on their original servers, especially as a large part of the web, nicknamed the ‘invisible’ or ‘deep’ web, may be accessed only through requests in databases or via passwords, making it difficult for robots to view and record data (even if partial captures may be performed). A presentation by the BNF team working on legal deposit and on the prefiguration of its Net art collection at a BNF Symposium was a good example of the latter; the examples chosen for the demonstration of the capture of Net art were ‘broken’ owing to the inability of webcrawler bots to cope with their technological make-up. It seems relevant to pursue a combination of museum and archive methods in order to maintain the richest experience of Net artworks.

of course the involvement of artists, art historians, art critics and Net art lovers would be intrinsic to the development of such projects.

Notes 1. Stallabrass, J. (2003), Internet Art: The Online Clash of Culture and Commerce, London: Tate Publishing, p. 44. 2.  Variable Media, www.variablemedia.net/ (active 15 April 2008).

3.  V2_Archive, http://framework.v2.nl/archive/general/default.xslt (active 15 April 2008).

4. Ippolito, J. (1998), The Museum of the Future: A Contradiction in Terms?, http://three.org/ ippolito/writing/wri_cross_museum.html (active 15 April 2008). 5. Archiving the Avant-Garde, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/about/avantgarde (active 15 April 2008).

6. V2_ (2004), Capturing Unstable Media: Deliverable 1.2 – Documentation and capturing methods for unstable media arts. http://archive.v2.nl/v2_archive/projects/capturing/1_2_capturing.pdf (active 15 April 2008).

7. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Legal deposit: five questions about Web Archiving at BnF, www. bnf.fr/pages/version_anglaise/depotleg/dl-internet_quest_eng.htm (active 15 April 2008).

114  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

8. Boutteville, J., Bureaud, A. and Lafforgue, N. (1996), Art et Technologie: la Monstration, www. olats.org/livresetudes/etudes/monstration/ (active 15 April 2008).

Abstracts

Mapping Outside the Frame: Interactive and Locative Art Environments Elizabeth Coulter-Smith and Graham Coulter-Smith

Abstract

This paper is concerned with locative art environments, an experiential form of art which engages the viewer both from within a specific location and in response to their intentional or unintentional input. The locative project is in a condition of emergence; an embryonic state in which everything is still up for grabs; a zone of consistency yet to emerge. As an emergent practice locative art, like locative media generally, is simultaneously opening up new ways of engaging in the world and mapping its own domain. (Drew Hemment, 2004) Artists and scientists have always used whatever emerging technologies existed at their particular time throughout history to push the boundaries of their fields of practice. The use of new technologies or the notion of ‘new’ media is neither particularly new nor novel. Humans are adaptive, evolving and will continue to invent and explore technological innovation. This paper asks the following questions: what role does adaptive and/or intelligent art play in the future of public spaces, and how does this intervention alter the relationship between theory and practice? Does locative or installation-based art reach more people, and does ‘intelligent’ or ‘smart’ art have a larger role to play in the beginning of this century? The authors discuss their current collaborative prototype and within the presentation demonstrate how software art has the potential to activate public spaces, and therefore contribute to a change in spatial or locative awareness. It is argued that the role and perhaps even the representation of the audience/viewer is left altered through this intervention. Keywords: contemporary art locative arts installations relational aesthetics

Aesthetics and Interactive Art Karen Cham

Abstract

Any discussion of aesthetics and interactivity must first transgress the divide in modern western Art History between art and technology. Despite the fact that technical principles have always underpinned fine art production (rules of perspective, proportion and the golden section, for example) photography, film, television and video are still marginalised in art historical dialogues. The mechanically reproduced artefact is easily dismissed in a discourse where value is still equated with dubious concepts of authenticity and originality anchored in production techniques. Digital artefacts manifest two problems of reproduction and access to a much greater extent than any earlier art. A digital artefact, by conventional standards, is even less authentic and original than a mechanically reproduced one; a true simulation; a mathematical model of the real. Furthermore, not only is the digital artefact accessible by the masses, it is very often interactive (i.e. shaped by audience input; a product of ‘the mass’ themselves). These material factors should not inhibit an academic discussion of the aesthetics of interactivity. An aesthetic value is always established by the consensus of an elite. In media studies for example, textual analysis of televisual artefacts clearly demonstrates that whilst television might appear generally accessible and understood by everyone there is quite clearly a relative, yet elaborate, aesthetic code operating within a wider, still elite, cultural context. In such a way it is easily possible to demonstrate various aesthetics of photography, film, television and video.

116  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

In the same vein, interactive media artefacts abound in our day-to-day lives. This paper argues that for academic dialogues to embrace the aesthetics of interactive art in a constructive and meaningful way the intellectual prejudice against reproduction and access must be abandoned. For example, how can one seriously analyse the aesthetic of Edward Ihnatowicz’s Senster (1970) without the context of contemporary science fiction when it is a fifteen-foot high hydraulic robot with a triple proboscis of sensors for a ‘head’? Only in this way can the use of wholly appropriate theories from media and cultural studies ensure that the technical skill of commercial producers, the narrative dexterity of on-line gamers and the visual eloquence of the television audience are accounted for in both interactive art production and theoretical discourses on new aesthetics. Keywords: art technology media aesthetics interactivity

When Presence-absence Becomes Pattern-randomness: Blast Theory’s Can You See Me Now? Maria Chatzichristodoulou [aka maria x]

Abstract

What is the meaning of embodiment and presence within a postmodern, posthuman and ‘post-media’ context? What is at stake when embodiment becomes virtual, distributed and/or hybrid? What happens when presence and absence turn into pattern and randomness? This paper explores the issues of posthuman presence and virtual embodiment in relation to current and emergent artistic practice in the area of performance. Blast Theory’s piece Can You See Me Now? first performed in 2001 (www.canyouseemenow. co.uk) is used as a case-study. The focus is on networked performance practices that employ the Internet and other networking technologies as distribution media, but also as spaces – that is, as cybernetic stages that span across physical and virtual spacetimes challenging established notions of presence and absence. Whereas performance is closely associated with the notion of physical, bodily presence, when it comes to (semi-) mediated, networked and other forms of technology-based performance practices ‘questions about presence and absence do not yield much leverage …’,1 as the corporeal body ceases to function as a tangible proof of presence. Presence becomes doubt. It becomes impregnated with absence (Derrida); an in-between state; a presence-absence. What happens while we exist in-between presence and absence in performance? Furthermore, the paper investigates strategies being developed in order to both shape, or embody, and relate through hybrid spacetimes, questioning the meaning of embodiment within a posthuman context. It is argued that, within this context, the conceptual dichotomy of presence-absence is not sufficient for the analysis of networked performances and encounters. The author further argues in favour of Hayles’s proposal of a complementary dialectic based on notions of pattern and randomness. Keywords: Blast Theory British art performance installation body telepresence

Note 1. Hayles, N. Katherine (1999), How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, p. 27.

Abstracts  117

Digital Archiving as an Art Practice Dew Harrison

Abstract

Archiving is a cultural activity involving the creation of vast electronic databases, which document and preserve art past and present for our education and heritage. However, this activity does not belong solely in the domain of information specialists, museum curators and librarians. Archiving can also be accepted as a form of art practice, and the ‘digital’ archive as a curatorial project, an art-based collaboration, or a piece of conceptual art. These new media art databases are being approached from a different direction and with a different intent than those of the major art galleries and national institutions. They are not constructed by trained archivists, but constitute ‘archives’ nonetheless. The author’s own practice has involved directing web collaborations into one artwork, which is a form of curation but remains as practice. She has created a large database of online exhibitions, which live on dedicated servers and constitute an archive of online work produced at that time under an overarching theme. She is in the process of archiving the work of 400 or so artists, produced in the same week-long media lab conditions over a period of eight years, into an electronic database, which could be understood as a curatorial project. She has created an artwork which could be seen as an archive of Duchamp’s work, but isn’t. It could be said that an artist’s website is an archive of their work, but not their practice; not a piece in its own right. When does the database archive exist as an artwork in itself then?

118  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

In this paper the author traces the idea of the archive as a form of art practice, from Duchamp to Art & Language, in that it situates investments in text and wordplay, indexing and database, archiving and curation as both content and a medium for a conceptual practice. Keywords: art practice digital media art curation digital archiving

The Digital Image and the Pleasure Principle: The Consumption of Realism in the Age of Simulation Hamid van Koten

Abstract

Digital technology has rapidly become the dominant provider of mass entertainment. Digital animation, computer-generated imagery (CGI) feature film, digital gaming, the photorealistic, all immersive environment lies just ahead of us. This paper seeks to examine the social and philosophical implications of the digital environment with reference to Marshall McLuhan’s notions of ‘hot and cold’ media, and drawing upon the works of Baudrillard, Lacan and Gerbner. Rather than adopting an ‘effects theory’, the author brings together these highly diverse approaches to understanding the digital environment, and explores the complex interrelationship between the producers, distributors and the consumers of the digital media product. What are the forces at work in the production and consumption of these digital environments? What makes these products so popular? What are the narratives and representational issues involved and what can these tell us about our culture? Specifically, the paper seeks to uncover two themes: pre-modern narrative and realism as the dominant form of digital representations in terms of production, and the Lacanian notion of the Imaginary as the dominant drive towards the consumption of these representations. Keywords: digital culture theory hot and cold media representation consumption realism

Abstracts  119

Preservation of Net Art in Mmuseums Anne Laforet

Abstract

Artists appropriated the Internet as soon as it became public in order to experiment with new artistic, social and technical practices commonly known as Net art. The museums and cultural institutions that are interested in this art have to reconsider the way they commission, exhibit, collect and preserve artworks, just as they have already done with other forms of ephemeral or process-based art. Within the museum, the balance between documentation and preservation is shifting in favour of documentation, owing to artworks that do not have a fixed or stable form but exist in different states. A rich, diverse and precise documentation is crucial to support preservation strategies that accept artworks as being variable, mutable and not static.

120  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

New or updated preservation models are needed. This paper offers an overview of models currently under development (especially those within museums and national libraries). The focus is on the concept of the archaeological museum as a potential model for Net art preservation. By combining museum and archival approaches, it is possible to keep track of the context of Net-based artworks by taking into account their interrelations within a dynamic environment. Net archiving tools allow close observation of how an artwork evolves, although this does not necessarily mean that the captured works function in the same way as the originals. By emphasising the dialogue between Net artworks and their environment, the institution would become a living archive, a research space, with fragments of artworks which could be updated and re-activated in multiple ways. Moreover, it could take the form of a partnership of organisations with different remits, methods and goals, i.e. a meta-institution composed of the many stakeholders involved in preserving Internet art. Keywords: Net art Variable Media preservation museum

Invisible Work: The Representation of Artistic Practice in Digital Visual Culture Ann-Sophie Lehmann

Abstract

Traditionally, artists have always reflected on their practice, technical achievements and representational skills. The genres of the self-portrait in front of the easel and the atelier-scene serve this self-reflective element of artistic practice. New media art it seems, has not yet generated a genre reflecting on its practical and technical procedures and skills. Although process and technology are prominent features in many art works, the initial procedures of construction seem to be too ‘technical’ to generate interesting visual material. Although many artists use their own image as working material, and viewers might become active practitioners in interactive artworks, the ‘artist at work’ is seldom represented as ‘work of art’. As the creative space of the media artist is currently more often described as a laboratory than an atelier, practice even tends to disappear inside a black box: the laboratory traditionally evokes experiment and invention kept from the public view. While new media art seems to exclude the representation of practice, other more applied domains of digital practice, like web design and computer animation, have created self-reflective genres in which practice is represented. Like their traditional precursors, the self-portrait at work and the atelier-scene, they serve to represent, celebrate and mystify professional skills of creation. This paper investigates the representational status of artistic practice in new media art, and using examples from different genres of new media art, will address the following questions: When does practice become representational? How do artists conceive and describe their creative spaces? Have digital production modes rendered creation invisible by transferring practice to the virtual realm? Keywords: art practice tools materials digital media

Abstracts  121

From UNCAGED to Cyber-Spatialism Ralf Nuhn

Abstract

The starting point for this paper is the author’s project UNCAGED, first exhibited at the National Museum of Childhood, part of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, during May and June 2004. It is a series of six ‘telesymbiotic’ installations, exploring interrelationships and transitions between screen-based digital environments and their physical surroundings. This installation has been documented in a commentated video.

122  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

The paper introduces the initial motivation behind the project, which was based on the idea to ‘uncage’ computer-based realities from the confines of their digital existence and to bring the remote computer world closer to our human experience. In addition, the author explores how his critical engagement with the work has nourished the impression that despite the perceptual fusion between the digital and the physical world, UNCAGED actually seems to highlight the distance between the two domains. In his view, all six exhibits bear an underlying absurdity, which arises from the very fusion between their physical and digital components. For the author-artist, this absurdity ultimately hints at the fallacy of the initial motivation behind UNCAGED and, in a wider context, questions the idea to seek in virtual worlds a place for meaningful human exchange and experiences. In the second part, the author discusses how these new insights have informed his new artistic approach, which is essentially concerned with exploring further the sociophilosophical issues implied in UNCAGED. In particular, he refers to his project CyberSpatialism, which is a series of canvases in which common computer connectors are inserted. The project makes specific references to Luigi Fontana’s slashed canvases and his concept of spatialism (which is usually regarded as an attempt to overcome the illusionistic representation of space in painting by introducing real physical space). By substituting Fontana’s slashes with computer connectors, Cyber-Spatialism implies an extension of the canvas into cyberspace, and thus attempts to address the notion, that in today’s (globalised) culture, real space is increasingly being replaced by virtual space. Further information about UNCAGED, including photos and videos, can be found at the project website, www.telesymbiosis.com (active 30 May 2008). Keywords: UNCAGED mixed reality media art Luigi Fontana Cyber-Spatialism

A Blueprint for Bacterial Life: Can a Science-art Fusion Move the Boundaries of Visual and Audio Interpretation? Elaine Shemilt

Abstract

Scientists from the Scottish Crop Research Institute have pioneered a method called GenomeDiagram, which enables visualisation of billions of gene comparisons simultaneously between over 300 currently sequenced bacterial genomes, including those of human and animal pathogens. Our project takes this scientifically-challenging work outside the fields of biology and medicine and places it into the context of interdisciplinary art. Drawing from our previous work we reflect the dynamic nature of biological systems that arise from these static genome sequences. We explore such processes using both visual and sound methods. Our research aims to have a consequential effect upon the future work of both the scientists and artists involved. The role of the artist should not be that of a mere illustrator: our interpretation of the data may have an effect upon the scientific research by enabling the recognition of new information and routes to new analysis. Similarly for the scientists the project aims to influence the direction of the art itself. As the process of abstraction influences the mode of visualisation, the form of visualisation affects the future process of abstraction, and we expect that greater insight of our own processes of deduction, and analysis of the data itself, will flow from this collaboration. This project investigates how complex data and images used by the GenomeDiagram, through interpretation and expression in a range of art forms, can help to develop and evolve the scientific tools themselves. This is achieved by utilising both modern printmaking and 2D/3D computer-generated imagery now combined with installation and sound. We are developing a multimedia installation based on the genetic plasticity and evolution of the bacterial pathogens. The aim is that the artistic interpretation will specifically not be an illustration or analogy of the data, rather an exploration of the influence of the surrounding spaces using both visual and sound feedback. The unifying thread of our artist/scientist collaboration is that we begin from data of a biological nature, which also imply certain processes. By de-contextualising them, we obtain a complementary viewpoint to the biological interpretation that would ordinarily be enforced on those data and processes. Fine art practice emphasises subjectivity and ambiguity whereas science practice attempts to identify objective truths. Despite the contrast between the two approaches they are unified because both disciplines thrive on lateral thinking and observation.

Abstracts  123

Keywords: printmaking digital art biology GenomeDiagram

CHArt – Computers and the History of Art

Computers and the History of Art looks at the application of digital technology to visual culture, particularly in relation to the study of the history of art, the work of museums and galleries, and of archives and libraries, as well as the broader issues of visual media. CHArt was established in 1985 by art and design historians who were also computer enthusiasts. CHArt’s largely university-based membership was soon augmented by members from museums and art galleries, as well as individuals involved in the management of visual and textual archives and libraries relevant to the subject. More recently CHArt has become a forum for the exchange of ideas concerned with all aspects of visual culture. CHArt continues to promote this activity in a number of ways. An annual two-day conference explores topical issues. The group maintains a website, www.chart.ac.uk, which provides information about activities relevant to its members. Among its activities CHArt has run a journal, now replaced by the Yearbook (see www.chart.ac.uk/yearbook1.html, www.chart.ac.uk/ yearbook2.html and www.chart.ac.uk/yearbook3.html for contents and how to order). CHArt also publishes Conference Proceedings and an online Newsletter and hosts an e-mail discussion group. Since 2000, conference proceedings have been available on the CHArt website. CHArt also sponsors the world-wide-web Virtual Library for the History of Art. CHArt’s Annual Conference is usually held in the autumn and focuses on current developments in the field. Recent conferences have included: 2001: Digital Art History. A Subject in Transition, British Academy, London. 2002: Digital Art History? Exploring Practice in a Network Society, British Academy, London. 2003: Convergent Practices: New Approaches to Art and Visual Culture, Birkbeck College, London. 2004: Futures Past: Twenty Years of Arts Computing, Birkbeck College, London. 2005: Theory and Practice, British Academy, London. 2006: Fast Forward. Art History, Curation and Practice after Media, Birkbeck, University of London. 2007: Digital Archive Fever, Birkbeck, University of London.

How to become a member of CHArt

CHArt membership is open to everyone who has an interest in the use of digital technology for the study and preservation of works of art and visual culture. To join, please complete the online application form on our website, www.chart.ac.uk and send it to: CHArt, Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London, 26–29 Drury Lane, London WC2B 5RL. Tel: +44 (0)20 7848 2013, Fax: +44 (0)20 7848 2980, www.chart. ac.uk, [email protected].

Membership information for 2009

CHArt membership is £15.00 and is valid for a calendar year. It includes a reduced rate for our annual conference. Student Membership includes a reduced student rate for our annual conference. Institutional Membership includes a reduced conference rate for up to three delegates from your institution and costs £35.00.

126  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

Please visit www.chart.ac.uk for further information.

Guidelines for Submitting Papers for the CHArt Yearbook

1. Texts

Papers should be submitted in hard copy and in electronic PC format, preferably in Word or RTF and should be of no more than 5,000 words. Please submit your paper to [email protected]. Please also submit a brief biography of no more than 75 words. Texts are accepted only in English.

2. Conditions

Submission of a paper for publication in the CHArt Yearbook will be taken to imply that it represents original work not previously published, that it is not being considered elsewhere for publication, and that if accepted for publication it will not be published elsewhere in the same form, in any language, without the consent of the editors and publishers. It is a condition of acceptance by the editor of a paper for publication that CHArt acquires automatically the copyright of the text throughout the world. However, the author shall retain a perpetual, non-exclusive licence to publish and distribute the paper under the condition that proper credit is given to the original published article.

3. Permissions

It is the responsibility of the contributor to obtain written permission for quotations where necessary and for the reprinting of illustrations or tables from material protected by copyright (published or unpublished). No payment can be made for obtaining any copyright required in order to use quotations or illustrations. It is the responsibility of the contributor to obtain written permission for the use of any illustration which remains in copyright. The contributor must supply details of any acknowledgement that may need to be placed in captions.

4. Illustrations

All illustrations should be designated as ‘Fig. 1’ etc. and be numbered with consecutive Arabic numerals. Each illustration should have a descriptive caption and should be mentioned in the text. Indication of the approximate position for each illustration in the text should be given. Illustrations should not normally exceed more than six per article. Please submit illustrations in electronic format, preferably as 300 dpi TIFF files.

5. References and notes

References and notes are indicated in the text by consecutive superior Arabic numerals (without parentheses). Please present all references and notes as endnotes in numerical

order. In multi-author references, the first six authors’ names should be listed in full, then ‘et al.’ may be used. References to books Author’s name and initials (year of publication), [year first published, if different], full title, place of publication: publisher, page numbers. Berners-Lee, T. (1999), Weaving the Web, San Francisco: Harpers, p. 23. Lasko, P. [1972], Ars Sacra, London: Yale (1994). References to essays/articles in a book Author’s name and initials (year of publication), [year first published, if different], ‘title of article’, title of book in full, editor’s name, editor’s initials (ed.) or (eds) if plural, series number (if any), place of publication: publisher, volume, page numbers. Smith, J. C. (1981), ‘The Kings and Queens’, The History Journal, Smith, P. (ed.), London, Little Brown, pp. 200–28. References to articles/essays in a journal Author’s name and initials, (year of publication), ‘title of essay’, title of journal, volume number: issue number, page numbers. Jones, T. A. (1990), ‘The British Coin’, British History, 19:1, pp. 98–121. References to essays/articles in conference proceedings Author’s name and initials, (year of publication), ‘title of essay’, title of proceedings, venue and date of conference, place of publication, page numbers. Grindley, N. (1999), ‘The Courtauld Gallery CD Project’, Computing and Visual Culture. Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual CHArt Conference, Victoria and Albert Museum, 24–25 September 1998, London, pp. 131–140.

128  Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice

Authors must check that reference details are correct and complete; otherwise the references cannot be used. As a final check, please make sure that the references accord with the citings in the text. References to online publications References to online publications should include the URL and the date last accessed.

Edited by Anna Bentkowska-Kafel, Trish Cashen, and Hazel Gardiner

Digital Visual Culture, the third CHArt yearbook from Intellect, presents the latest research into the relationship between theory and practice across digital media and technology in the visual arts and investigates the challenges of contemporary research and art curation, particularly in regard to new media artworks. The contributors to this volume discuss the impact of technological advances on visual art and the new art practices that are developing as a result. Many aspects of new interdisciplinary and collaborative practices are considered, such as net art and global locative environments, and installations that are themselves performance, or games that often take place simultaneously in mixed realities. Digital Visual Culture is an important addition to the ongoing discussion surrounding postmodern art practice in art and digital media. Anna Bentkowska-Kafel is a research fellow for King’s Visualisation Lab at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London. Trish Cashen supports innovations in humanities teaching at the Open University. Hazel Gardiner works with the Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland and the Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi (Great Britain).

ISSN 1743-3959 ISBN 978-1-84150-248-9

00

9 781841 502489

intellect | www.intellectbooks.com

BENTKOWSKA-KAFEL /CASHEN/GARDINER

Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice Computers and the History of Art, Volume Three

COmPUTERS AND THE HISTORY Of ART Volume 3

DIGITAL VISUAL CULTURE THEORY AND PRACTICE Edited by Anna Bentkowska-Kafel, Trish Cashen and Hazel Gardiner